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Google Businesses The Almighty Buck United States

Accused of Underpaying Women, Google Says It's Too Expensive To Get Wage Data (theguardian.com) 431

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women. Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators' ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women. Noting Google's nearly $28 billion annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the U.S., DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company's defense, saying, "Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
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Accused of Underpaying Women, Google Says It's Too Expensive To Get Wage Data

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  • by night_flyer ( 453866 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @09:12AM (#54497031) Homepage

    why isn't their entire workforce made of women, wouldn't it be cheaper that way?

  • They already know everything anyway.
  • by Vermonter ( 2683811 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @09:16AM (#54497061)
    ...some sort of search engine, perhaps.
  • Really Google? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Avantare ( 573582 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @09:16AM (#54497065)
    Why are you afraid of honoring the request? That amount is a pittance to you and the WORLD knows it. The only thing I can think of is that you have been underpaying women since the very first one that was hired and by giving this information to the US government you'll have to come clean and pay a pittance of a fine. Boo hoo... Companies are making record profit from what I see on the Internet and they are not paying their help as they should. Then these companies complain they are unable to hire replacements. It's because the companies don't want to pay the potential employees what they are worth. It takes money to make money and companies that don't want to pay their potential employees are only shooting themselves in the foot. Avantare
    • In court, push back hard now, even if you know you will lose, and make your opponent reticent about making requests in the future.
  • Google Knows (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RotateLeftByte ( 797477 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @09:28AM (#54497129)

    Google Knows everything about everyone. Where you go, what you spend money on and everything else.
    To say that it can't find out wage data is a pile of crock.

    Google could if it wanted tell the FBI how much each Agent spent in expenses for the past 5 years.

    • Google Knows everything about everyone. Where you go, what you spend money on and everything else.

      If that's true, Google should stop showing me ads for things I already bought.

    • Google Knows everything about everyone.

      If that were even close to true they would easily know enough about politicians that requests like this would never see the light of day.

  • 1) Google showed it was incapable of discrimination due to its process. *facepalm*
    2) Google took a government contract and doesn't want to comply with the rules of doing so. *facepalm*
    3) Google is spending way more effort/money to not hand of the information than if they had. *facepalm*

    This is all kinds of retarded. *facepalm*

    • I'm pretty sure Google is not retarded, so you must be missing something here.

      • He's not "missing the point". He's showing that google's rationale is bogus, so anyone with half a brain should realize that google is lying. You can be sure they've already run the analysis and know that they're in for a world of hurt if they give it up.

        Or are their systems so deficient that they can't provide the data? Or alternatively, purposefully designed so as not to be able to easily provide the data?

        • You're missing the point. Of course, Google's rationale is bogus. That doesn't make them retarded.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Companies that track employee salary based on voluntary reports of income haven't found that to be the case.

          https://www.glassdoor.com/research/does-google-have-a-gender-pay-gap/

          The Department of Labor hasn’t shared their data or methodology showing how they came to the conclusion that Google has a gender pay problem. In this post, we show that men on average do earn about 16.3 percent more than women at Google.

          But that’s not a complete or fair comparison, as it compares software engineers and marketing associates as if they’re in the same pay bracket. Instead, when we make an apples-to-apples comparison of workers with similar jobs and backgrounds, that 16.3 percent gender pay gap largely disappears.

          We find an “adjusted” gender pay gap at Google of about 1.6 percent, which is not statistically significantly different from zero. Put differently, there’s no evidence in salaries on Glassdoor of a systematic gender pay gap at Google.

          Men and women aren't interested in the same jobs as one another, and some jobs pay more than others, so you're inevitably going to end up with a difference in how one group is paid. Furthermore, stop trying to speak on behalf of real women, you neither think nor behave anything like them.

    • If the records show illegal paying practices then the cost of that report is much higher than the cost of just the report.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    They could reduce the cost to $80000 by having women do it.

  • Simple reasoning (Score:3, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @10:04AM (#54497287)
    Let's assume that Google will take the path of least cost.
    So it's cheaper to send a lawyer to explain the data is too hard to collate
    So it's cheaper to pay the fine or lose the contract

    That must tell you something about the cost of "doing the right thing". Not that the cost of obtaining the information is too high, but the cost of fixing whatever the data tells the government is too high.

    So we can infer that there IS an issue here. It is also reasonable that Google knows this, or it wouldn't be baulking at providing the data (and exploiting the P.R. benefits of showing "there! we do pay people fairly").

    The question is whether Google would consider the odds of getting found out and having to pay people more, AND paying a fine for obstructing some dam' law or other, is worth the effort they are going to, to behave in such a manner.

  • by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @10:18AM (#54497339)

    Although feminists will tell you otherwise.

    • Sure it is, you think there was really all of these other genders? They have 'socially' engineered them. O.o

  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @10:35AM (#54497411) Homepage

    I'd just like to point out that this is a long-running story. As with all complex issues, there are two sides.

    Yes, Google has to provide a certain amount of information to the government, as part of its government contracts. however, they have already provided quite a lot of information. The DoL is now looking for historical information, and wants to interview a wide range of employees throughout the company. This is beyond the usual level of stuff that government contractors have to provide.

    The DoL claims that this is because they find discrepancies in male/female pay at Google. Now, I have zero knowledge of Google's internal pay practices, but on the face of it, this is extraordinarily unlikely. First of all, the IT industry wage-gap has already been thoroughly debunked: a gap only exists if you deliberately ignore things like years taken off for childcare, which result in less experience and missed promotion opportunities. Second, Google is big enough, and under enough observation, that their HR department will be extraordinarily careful about issues like this.

    All of which leads me to suspect that there's a hidden motive here. Maybe someone in the DoL is trying to make a name for themselves? Maybe there's a private lawsuit waiting in the wings, hoping for a big settlement? Maybe someone is just hoping to be bought off, possibly via a revolving door? Dunno what the agenda is, but I'll give odds that it's something at least borderline corrupt on the part of the DoL...

    • Maybe someone in the DoL is trying to make a name for themselves?

      A universal lightning rod offered up to people who are tired of thinking.

      In my experience, either a person already views the world through this lens—in which case it's redundant—or a person tries extremely hard not to open this appalling box until some directly corroborating evidence forces the issue—in which case floating the possibility prematurely without offering up a smoking gun (or at least a lipstick-stained cigarette

  • Select * FROM employeeDB where gender='F' ORDER BY role, year DESC
    Select * FROM employeeDB where Gender='M' ORDER BY role, year DESC

    There you go.
    • Did you assume there are only two genders? That's a very grave sin, my child.

      That'll be 10 "Our Mothers" and 20 "Hail Dworkins" as penance.
  • by PrimaryConsult ( 1546585 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @11:19AM (#54497611)

    The government already knows how much everyone makes and whether they are female. They should get it from the IRS and mine it themselves.

  • I mean, the company's mission statement is literally to compile ALL of the information in the world. But their own pay roll is too hard for them. That's funny.
  • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @07:24PM (#54499383) Homepage Journal

    If you study the google a bit, it seems obvious to me (after reading many of those books) that the extreme incentive policies could easily create the appearance of gender discrimination that reflect actual compensation results. To summarize briefly, if a particular googler is involved in an extremely successful project, then that googler will get obscenely more money than others, even though they are doing the same kind of work. I don't think this favors men because they are inherently more skilled, harder workers, or even luckier. The two most likely causes are related to gender, however: Willingness to take extreme risks and prioritization of work over life. On that basis, I think has two primary secrets they are trying to conceal here:

    (1) How they protect losers from failure because they want to encourage risky behaviors. (And even with that insurance, I think women are more risk averse on average.)

    (2) That work-life balance at the google is really a lie and the company is dominated in every way (including in compensation) by workaholics.

    The strong incentive pay just makes it look worse and might make the google look more EVIL than it is. If that is possible. Makes me sad how the unbounded love of money turned the good google into such a monster. The motto of today's google: "All your attention are belong to us."

    The ultimate threat is when people realize that all of the world's information has been prioritized to the BS info the advertisers are paying the google to shove down our throats by abusing our privacy and by raping our personal information. All in a futile quest to solve an unsolvable problem. There is no biggest number and there is no profit that is big enough to "solve" super-greed.

    As usual, today's Slashdot has been disappointing, though at least it isn't evil as we measure the google. In particular I lament the lack of funny comments. However I just got the weird idea for units of EVIL measured in googlevils? Should be shorter, but something along those lines.

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