Google Pay Study Finds It Underpaid Men For Some Jobs

This is pretty funny. It appears that “The Memo” is bearing fruit at some level. According to Google’s blog post about it, among Level 4 Software Engineers “men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women.” In other words, their best attempts at objectivity found favoritism toward women in at least one area. If my math is correct, it probably worked out to less than $1000 for each of those men, but it’s still a pretty funny thing to see.

NPR ends with this:

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.

Apparently some people have to be more equal than others or its not equality. Live by equality, die by equality, folks. Anybody who thinks Google did this without doing their dead level best to avoid it is smoking something.

Edit: A more cynical or conspiratorial take is that Google did this to try to help their case in the lawsuit that came out of James Damore’s memo. I actually don’t know if that lawsuit is still ongoing, though.

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I’m much more surprised that this saw the light of day than I am by the fact that it’s true. Really, who could get reprimanded in 2019 for overpaying a woman or underpaying a man?

Government contract engineering firms like defense contractors have been paying women engineers more than men engineers for decades. The government gives contract award preferences to shops that have more-equal ratios of women to men, so there’s enormous demand for women engineers. It sounds like the demand for female engineers and female employees generally has migrated to the (truly) private sector.

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