Accused of underpaying women, Google says it's too expensive to get wage data

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429904

"Asked about a hypothetical, Wagner explained that if a female employee starts at a lower salary than a male colleague in the same job at Google, she may continue to make less even if they both excel in their first year and score the same on evaluations."

I think this is pretty common in companies and not really related to gender.

I am saddened that the society will now likely expend lot of energy to chase this problem in the special case of different genders, while doing nothing at all for the more general problem. Is this even desirable? It's just one of the many games that people play on each other.

I personally think that everybody should get the same salary, period, because you can always make an argument that someone should be paid more. That seems to be the only way to make children (and I really mean people) to stop arguing.

Google's stand that $100k is too expensive does not engender good-faith -- it's difficult to believe this is not an obstructionist strategy.

This seems like a witch hunt. Perhaps the data does confirm a statistical pay gap, but the reasons are open to interpretation; and it's simply difficult to defend against the rallying cry of "omg discrimination", so they resist giving it up.

What they mean is they already have the results, and the fines the companies will face as a result of paying less are too expensive.

>“This is obviously a very time-consuming and burdensome project,” said Lisa Barnett Sween, one of Google’s attorneys, claiming that the company has already worked 2,300 hours at a cost of nearly $500,000 to partially comply with the government’s demands, which she argued were broad and unconstitutional. “Our courts must act to check this abuse of power.”

$500,000/2,300 = $217.39/hr