Are men on Google paid less than women? Not really
At the end of each year, Google carries out a profitability analysis to determine whether employees of different sex and races having similar jobs are paid equally. On Monday, Google published a blog post with selected findings from the 2018 analysis, highlighting that proposed changes in 2019 would have paid male engineers less than female engineers in a lower job category, referred to internally as level 4 engineers.
Since Google's analysis took the deviation before changes were implemented, level 4 male engineers were not paid less than women. The company's annual analysis only compares employees in the same workgroup, so that the results do not reflect race or gender differences in employment and promotion.
At Google, employees are paid in salaries, equity, and bonuses. Compensation is determined by an employee's position, performance and placement. But managers also have access to a pool of discretionary resources that they can allocate to individual employees. After the latest analysis identified the gender difference in compensation among level 4 engineers, a deeper company analysis found the deviation from managers planning to allocate more estimates to women than men in 201[ads1]9.
Google has publicly shared its annual analysis before. In the 2017 analysis, the company found statistically significant wage differences for 228 employees in six occupational categories, including men and women in several counties, and "Black and Latinx / Hispanic Googlers across the United States." But the company has never revealed this level of detail on gender.
Google said it shared the male pay differential in this case because the results were counterintuitive. But the analysis comes as Google is facing a survey by the US Department of Labor and a lawsuit by current and former female employees, both of which claim that Google systematically discriminates against women in pay and promotion. Kelly Ellis, a former Google software engineer and plaintiff in the case, claims she was employed at Level 3, the recent college degree category, despite having four years of professional experience. The lawsuit claims that weeks after Ellis joined the company, Google hired a male engineer with the same level 4 experience as translated into higher pay and potential access to bigger bonuses and multiple stocks.
Google said it is now analyzing whether women are employed at lower levels than men with similar backgrounds. "Our first step is to equalize equity analysis to assess how employees are leveled out when they are employed and whether we can improve how we level," the company wrote. Google estimates previous experience in assigning new hires to a level, but the annual analysis only compares employees with their assigned level.
Google also analyzed equity by race for US employees, but the company said it couldn't release the data because it didn't release demographic data before.
Google's selective information lacked much context. For example, Google's blog post highlighted the fact that it made $ 9.7 million in adjustments to a total of 10,677 Googlers to make compensation more similar in 2019. It's about $ 900 per employee, at a company where the median workers made $ 197,274 in 2017. [19659003] The number of adjustments increased dramatically from last year, when the analysis of the 2017 data prompted Google to adjust salaries for only 228 employees. Google said the figure was higher this year because level 4 is a broad category that includes many engineers, and because Google included new rents in the analysis for the first time in 2018.
Google notes that 49 percent of the total dollars allocated for adjustments, went against new hires. However, Google will not disclose the gender or racial distance in the new rental category without saying that they did not see the same gap as favored women.
Jim Finberg, the lawyer representing the current and former female employees in the pay case, says Google's report contradicts expert analysis of the company's own salary data. The plaintiffs apply for coursework for around 8,300 current and former employees. "It is very disappointing that, instead of dealing with the real gender payoffs for women, Google has decided to increase the compensation to 8,000 male software engineers," Finberg wrote in an email to WIRED. "Come on, Google! It's time to do the right thing."
