Google Pay Study Finds It Underpaid Men for Some Jobs (2019)
80 comments
·February 9, 2025tomohelix
WWLink
Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up.
Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...
coffeeaddict1
Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?
WWLink
About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.
Spivak
It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a job I'm fighting for them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.
scarab92
You're mistaking prevalence for bias.
There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why).
However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women.
As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.
I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.
mcv
Really? When I was in university in the 1990s, Math had more women than men.
Women were rarer in CS, but still more common than female software developers I've encountered in my working life. All of the ones I've worked with were excellent.
pydry
The fact she was proud of it and that at that time this form of discrimination was considered laudable is a signal that it was more likely just simple discrimination.
jokethrowaway
No, this happens because you score brownie points if you have a female workforce or a diverse (read non-white) workforce.
In many countries (UK in my case) "positive discrimination" (an oxymoron, if you ask me) is enshrined in law and actually allow to discriminate candidates based on gender.
At least 3 of my clients work with recruiters that bring candidates who are only female or non white. (I'm not white myself but I found the clients outside of recruitments, I hope I'm not a diversity hire!).
Beside, whenever you start applying non meritocratic filters, the pool of talent shrink and you are forced to pick among a smaller pool, which inevitably will have less of the most talented folks.
t-writescode
Having spoken with some truly incredible women engineers who battled through the tiers and tiers and tiers of strife and struggles and bullshit women in the engineering world have to deal with to make any sort of progression for themselves, that 5:1 in favor of women is a VERY good thing. How many 1:5 man teams have you seen? How many 0:5 man teams?
Getting more women and getting more women-majority teams is a net good not only to the hilarious gender disparity in tech but also for the individual engineers, especially women, who don’t have strong, similar-to-themselves mentors and people to look up to.
scarab92
So basically, “discrimination is okay when I do it”.
It’s concerning how many people don’t see other people as individuals and instead see them as classes. This intellectual laziness results in discriminatory outcomes because it presumes that balance can be achieved by punishing different individuals within the same class.
It’s terrible that a 50 year old woman experienced discrimination, but privileging a 20 year old women doesn’t fix that. You’re ignoring the individuals that were harmed, privileging someone else that doesn’t need it, discriminating against 20 year old men to “balance” the privilege that 50 year old men received.
None of this makes sense.
throwawaydjf
Are you saying women don’t face sexism anymore?
gjsman-1000
The fact that this is downvoted, shows HN commentators have no idea why the current president won.
Those 20 year olds aren’t ignorant of the fact that they are being discriminated against, and they will one day be our future voters and politicians.
Can we be surprised when they want to burn it all down? Can we be surprised when they flock to anyone offering a sympathetic ear?
Reverse discrimination is a fundamentally short term and self-defeating strategy.
tdb7893
Yeah, experience is that women tend to stick together on teams because of the shit they experience all the time on other teams. Mentoring women engineers was eye opening at the number get asked out at work or get asked if they are engineers or other a million other problems. If people have a problem with women engineers sticking together they first have to fix the culture problem.
busterarm
When my brother was starting his career in university IT in the very early 90s, CS was still part of the math department and most places were anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 women. Many people at the time considered operating a computer to be equivalent to secretarial work.
Such a gender disparity in tech is relatively recent and pretty much since the iPhone and the flood of zero-interest money into the industry. And yet all of the big FAANGs hire lots of women.
And as someone who has done lots of hiring across the industry, generally women don't even apply to jobs that aren't big recognized brands anymore.
kalleboo
> pretty much since the iPhone
I would say it's since the dot-com crash, I went to university in 2003 and it was like 100:1 men in the CS courses back then.
gjsman-1000
So it’s okay to correct a wrong, with a wrong; the ends justify the means. Got it.
I’ll be looking up your bank account to steal your life savings, upper 0.1%er that you are globally, and hand your cash to someone who actually needs it. Thanks for the moral license.
null
xyst
Great - you provide an anecdotal case of a mid tier manager showing off some metric. What I want to know: is the performance of this team/org worse, better or the same as others?
> Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately quite common in that company.
You have to ask yourself: why does nobody speak up? This is because of the loss of worker power. Corporate MBA flunkies don’t give a fuck about pay equity. If they can under pay (man|woman|non-binary) folk, they will do it and use politics/fake economics as cover to do so.
Tech workers not unionizing has fucked not only people of today. But people of tomorrow (your children and grand children).
But sure, yea let’s keep that fantasy alive of “yea we should unionize but I want to be a billionaire too and exploit others so let’s not do that. Also I get paid 6 figs to not care about others”
scarab92
Unions would be terrible for tech workers, because of the high variance in output between individuals.
Your best workers would be underpaid and leave, your worst overpaid and stay.
xyst
Good ‘ole “your best talent leaves and worst talent stays” anti-union/union busting propaganda. Have heard this many times over the years yet have not seen any data confirming this.
Plays on your emotions but besides fear it doesn’t have any legs to stand on.
JohnnyLarue
LOLOLOL and the union dues too, right? Guy is fresh out of Praeger U.
jokethrowaway
All the unionised sectors I know people in complains about unions extracting money for them and not doing anything
That's not the problem and not the solution.
Nobody speaks up because if you do you are canceled and branded as racist / mysoginist. Society is too polarised and freedom of speech is just a memory.
That said, I noticed (for the first time) people complaining and leaving 0 stars reviews at the last DEI training so maybe the times are changing.
JohnnyLarue
Let's hope not.
tdb7893
Some context from the time: Google was facing a class action lawsuit for systematically underpaying women that they eventually settled for 118$ million dollars. It's a complicated thing and definitely not just Google hating men (their track record at the time on things like payouts to male executives accused of malfeasance shows that).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-11...
1oooqooq
also since early 2010s google and others were hapilly underpaying everyone, true inclusivity. i bet any category researched would show lower pay by seniority since market was illegaly/artificialy not adjusting thanks to the shady no poach backroom deals.
all this show is a correlation of seniority with males.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...
runeblaze
Useful information for HN from the original Google blog-post:
> First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women.
In other words, "some jobs" here is mid-level software engineers.
bena
I think this may be a case where people are reacting to the title rather than the content. The article seems to point out a reason why Google would publish this information.
> Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by women who allege systemic underpayment. And the Department of Labor is investigating whether Google pays women less.
With that context, the Google study's findings is almost comical. They're basically saying "Oh, we're not underpaying women, we're actually underpaying men."
Also the manner in which the pay gap was distributed.
> The Washington Post explains that in Google's 2018 study, "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category."
Ferret7446
I recall there being a few discussions calling out the irony at the time. Unfortunately, the misguided political fervor behind the equally misguided lawsuit only ramped up since then.
dijit
I have a huge amount of respect for the fact that they would even publish the information.
I mean; zeitgeist at the time was that it’s unconscionable to ever give men any equity in the discussion about equality. The only narrative that was permitted was that men were “superior” to women for time immemorial and men today should be punished, that they are over represented in everything of any importance and given much more favourability in all endeavours. - at least, as a person who grew up stunningly poor, surrounded by drugs and violence but happening to be a white man, this was how it felt.
The reality is of course much more nuanced than that, however it remained the only discussion permissible. It must have took a great deal of courage to publish something that went against this, especially from a company that’s so widely promoting the narrative. In fact, it makes me believe their other initiatives are more genuine than I would have thought otherwise.
PS: I don’t mind if what I said makes you uncomfortable. It was my truth and made me resoundingly bitter; because I couldn’t even talk about it.
SlightlyLeftPad
The messaging of men needing to be punished is definitely how it was felt and that produces the sort of society we’re living in right now. I still don’t believe that’s the actual intent but it can still be perceived that way and it’s important to consider.
erikerikson
I had a professor organize a group of older women to encircle me and shout insults and tell me how horrible I was because of my race and gender. The rationale was that those women were taking out their frustrations from being abused by men on me. Ironically, they were unaware that I had been beaten, molested, and burned by my mother. There are social actors with whom this isn't just a communication perception problem.
It is just as stupid for abuse to happen by the hands of women as it is at the hands of men. There is deep historical precedent with a lot of lasting ramifications. An eye for an eye makes us all blind and all that.
SlightlyLeftPad
I’m sorry that happened to you, that’s terrible and a pretty shameful thing to do to another innocent person. I would have raised hell if I was treated that way, especially for a class I was paying a load of money for. Unacceptable.
Edit: I would have also raised hell if I saw someone else getting treated this way by a professor.
Ferret7446
Well, it was 2019, that was roughly the start of the accelerated increase in censorship that peaked roughly less than a year ago. Certainly, a year ago, there would be no way they would have published this, but in 2019 it was still relatively acceptable.
busterarm
Ever since my career started in finance and tech 20 years ago, every company I've worked for _bragged_ openly that they paid women more than men in every position. Usually it's around 4-5%.
If they're all[1] doing it...
[1]: Top tier hedge funds and big tech.
throwawaydjf
[flagged]
scarab92
> Women have been screwed over forever and still are.
The first part of this sentence is correct, the later part isn’t.
Women are now significantly privileged over men in educational and early career opportunities.
The idea that this “balances out” is obviously false, because you’re talking about different generations. Young men being discriminated against now is just as unfair as it was to previous generations of women that were discriminated against in the past.
throwawaydjf
Not in my experience. I’ve seen teams come up with justifications like that female candidates don’t have enough experience in certain technologies, won’t be good cultural fits, or not team players, all rationales that don’t get applied to male candidates.
My favorite example is when hiring rockstar developers who are anti-social or toxic. For some reason, it’s ok to hire men who act that way, but totally unacceptable when women do.
In startups, leadership goes along with it because they don’t have time to deal with it. In corporate environments HR doesn’t know enough to pushback or their KPIs are if they filled the open positions.
The problem is that if you don’t want to hire someone, there so many different ways to disqualify them.
scarab92
The problem is you’re clearly talking about this from the perspective of a personal anecdote.
If you look at the general experiences of a young men, you’ll see that they are discriminated against in university admissions, in early career hiring and in early career promotion.
This is justified by data points which average outcomes over different age groups. The result may be company wide gender balance, but when you break it down by age you see that the it’s not really a balance, it’s just discrimination against women in some cohorts and discrimination against men in others.
bell-cot
Read up on the psych experiments where they've tested how hard people are willing to work to get a dollar they don't have, vs. how hard they're willing to work to keep a dollar that they do have.
No "male ego is so brittle" assumptions are needed, to explain why many men (and other groups) get so worked up over DEI issues.
antisthenes
> Women have been screwed over forever
Start learning history.
2muchcoffeeman
>Women have been screwed over forever and still are. So what if some women are getting some advantages?
You don’t see a problem with young men idolising Andrew Tate and Donald Trump?
Is there real data men are actually being marginalised in a real way? Dunno. But feelings and emotions right?
>The male ego is so brittle.
Even your comment is basically “man up”.
These are hard problems to solve and society has a tendency to over correct.
gruez
>Is there real data men are actually being marginalised in a real way? Dunno. But feelings and emotions right?
It's not hard to find. eg. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/08/07/wome...
throwawaydjf
All that says is women seem more serious about education and men feel like they don’t need college for their jobs. How does it show men are being marginalized?
slater
(i think you misread OP as the complete opposite..?)
2muchcoffeeman
My understanding of the post is that women have been marginalised for so long, the poster thinks it’s ok that we make provisions to correct this. The poster doesn’t mind we take some actions to correct this.
The poster also says that meritocracy is an illusion. And men have too much ego, and that it’s too easy for men to have their egos hurt.
Am I wrong? I don’t particularly disagree with any of those points.
aredox
[flagged]
djohnston
> Joelle Emerson, chief executive of the consulting company Paradigm, told The New York Times that Google was advancing a "flawed and incomplete sense of equality." Google should instead address "equity," she said, examining structural issues faced by women engineers.
And from the linked 2019 article:
> Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity.
Unreal XD. I genuinely do not understand how you can find yourself siding with these termites.
hn_throwaway_99
Perhaps a minor point, but I think your argument would have been stronger and more convincing if you didn't refer to people you disagree with as "termites".
I think the top NYT comment on this article highlights a very real problem that infested a lot of academia and places in corporate America. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that many of these places, especially in academia, have done real soul searching and considered that there are real problems that they were responsible for. Instead, I feel that in a lot of places you just see a "backlash to the backlash", i.e dismissing fair criticism as "the tide of unintellectual MAGA-ism":
> “When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work.” Obviously, this conclusion does not fit the politically correct mindset of most Google employees and management (or, for that matter, of the New York Times.)
> So, Google is searching for more data, and some explanation, of why the initial conclusion, that salary disparity may not put women at a disadvantage, must be wrong. I’m sure that if the results of the study were the reverse of what they showed, and demonstrated a bias against women, there would have been no head-scratching and no quest for further study.
> This illustrates a problem likely present with a great deal of scientific research, especially work in the social sciences. People look for results that match their preconceived notions, and keep looking until they find what they expect. When they find the expected, they stop looking. It’s a potent and pernicious source of bias.
> Pay disparities are both complex and important. By all means, Google, and society at large, should study the problem carefully and thoroughly. But we should leave open the possibility, that the truth may not be what we initially believe.
I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated.
Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company.
This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements.
That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.