I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.
I would say this makes it more likely for people to be underpaid, especially when factoring in hours worked. See SpaceX for another example.
A company like Google, paying substantially over minimum wage, is probably not underpaying most employees systematically, almost by definition IMO.
If a company underpays all its employees equally, it's still underpaying. Companies that do this are taking advantage of how people are not rational actors.
Supply and demand of willing free-will workers? Profitability of the company? Something else?
Or what a Wall Street hedge fund can pay?
Political campaigns have the same property in a lot of cases.
So long as people want to express their preferences in where they work based on the content of the work, the mission of the organization, the laptops they issue, or any other set of criteria, I think it's fair game that those choices tip the supply/demand relationship in or away from their favor.
Now I'm hearing that "it doesn't matter that there are significant numbers of both underpaid women and underpaid men" from you.
I guess it's not very clear to me what you think the issue is here.
^ That's like saying that two people can each be shorter than each other. It's not possible according to the way the "less than" function is defined.
I still agree that 'underpaid' is a difficult term here. Maybe the 80% are overpaid? The only hard fact in this example would be that the salary is more skewed than it should be for a 'fair' compensation.
Should the salary distribution mirror the talent distribution, or no?
In large companies with many career levels, the role level indicates the perceived value for the company. Then, the distribution within the level doesn't matter that much, as long as the difference between minimum and maximum pay is relatively small, and there is not much overlap to the neighborhood levels. Of course, there is no objective criterion what "relatively small" means in this context.
And, as the article already points out, this only covers fairness within the same level. Maybe even more important is if everybody is evaluated in the same way when it comes to career progress.
I believe the productivity figures are at least a factor of 2, and probably a tail out to a factor of 10 or more versus the median developer (and then a left-going distribution under the median where a substaintial number of developers do not create any value at all). Under that set of beliefs, 20% making ~$150K and 80% making ~$200K is actually insufficient skew vs a “fair” system.
What is happening though is a flaw within our logical frameworks. Our cultural biases are making something evident.
If more women are underpaid than men, then that it is obviously and overtly a form of sexism... logically this implicates that If more men are underpaid than women then it is also sexism.
Instead of calling out the logical implication why do people jump to an illogical conclusion?
The question is now, do women experience sexism in terms of compensation at google or do men? Or do neither?
If the answer is neither than what does it mean when I see videos like this popping up all over my facebook feed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pQ-fUXAeCI
> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
So they were compensated out of proportion with their demographic makeup of the company--they made up a larger share but needed more money to "catch up."
Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.