Hacker News Reader

So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?

> This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.

But you're perfectly fine with her getting worse treatment because of her gender? Since you don't believe in her right to sue to remedy this.. I'm sorry, but your post reeks of "these thing's don't affect me and therefore don't need fixing".

I literally haven't talked to anyone this month who has as materially successful a life as her. Probably this year. Maybe longer. Yeah I'm OK if she feels hard done by, although I'm also OK with her feeling good.

I've not read the specifics of the case, but based on her complaint? I'm completely OK with her losing a HR struggle for stupid reasons [0]. Judges don't need to be involved. I just wish we could all be mistreated with that sort of compensation and power.

> So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?

I'm happy to admit to being biased in favour of basic statistics. Berkson's paradox isn't some weird edge case, it turns up all the time. If you don't like it there isn't much you can do, even moving to a different universe isn't enough to escape math.

Based purely on her complaint, Google could quite reasonably have been chosing someone with a signal of higher quality. In the same paragraph she complains about 19 vs 22 years of experience as though that matters too, which keeps undermining my outrage.

[0] I'm not even taking a position on whether the reasons are gender related. I've seen this sort of thing play out among male executives based on height, tone of voice, random luck, coincidence, nepotism and all sorts of silly factors. It could even be legitimately good reasons. I don't see why, especially legally speaking, anyone needs to care. Nobody has a solid metric to measure executive quality, or we'd just use that.

So principles doesn't matter when you feel jealousy? That's a weird stance to have. It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.

Why not view it as good that an executive risks much to remove the glass ceiling, and perhaps prove biases in the processes affecting the whole chain? It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.

I think OP is trying to convey that he's unconvinced that gender bias is at play here, and taking into account the fact that she's incredibly privileged, the thought of a powerful person making a tenuous claim to victimhood is not something that elicit much sympathy.

In the end, I think it's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about individual cases. Fact is that in a lot of companies salary varies, sometimes quite wildly, based on all sorts of factors: how well you negotiated, how badly the position was needed at the time of hiring, the mood of the hiring manager that day, how much of the budget was used that year, how well the company is doing at the time of hiring, stellar alignment, etc. It's very hard to say which factor played a part. This is true for most roles and not limited to the executive level.

The law states that (from the judge's opinion): "Rowe must demonstrate that Google failed to pay her equally to a man in the same geographic area for (a) equal work on a job the performance of which requires equal skill, effort and responsibility, and which is performed under similar working conditions, or (b) substantially similar work, when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, and performed under similar working conditions.", but this is kind of an unreasonable standard to really prove gender discrimination IMHO.

So any male getting paid more than any female can only be explained by discrimination? In some cases it's probably a factor. In others: probably not? Hard to distinguish the two however.

All we can really do is statistics over a large group, and then say something about that group. But that says nothing about individuals. There are short Dutch people, tall Indonesians, and Germans with a sense of humour.

Yeah I think this is going to be really hard to prove on an individual level. Not impossible though. It depends on the job. For instance in programming the work and skill levels vary so wildly it would be very hard. But think about something like sales.

If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?

Or in rare cases you might get written/recorded damning evidence.

> If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?

It depends; being better in sales does not automatically make a person a good team lead, or whatever else they're being promoted to.

And even "bring in more sales" is not that simple because if you're a curmudgeon that makes everyone around you miserable then that's probably going to be factor. Stuff like that.

I think you are mistakenly conflating gender bias with qualification bias. The OP's invocation of Berkson's Paradox here does not say anything about sex. You could change the sex of this female executive and OP's argument would still stand.

I think they're trying to say that it should be normal to get worse treatment despite one's gender

> Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing. Amongst people actively working in a field, qualifications are a negative signal of quality.

Source. Because on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.

And you seem to have missed the whole point of the lawsuit which is that she wanted the company to simply follow their normal processes.

> ...on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.

Is it really? If you put up a significant barrier to a group of people, and only the exceptional can cross those barriers, it's shouldn't be that surprising when the pool that make it past those barriers is filled with a higher percentage of exceptional people.

Sort of like how a surprising percentage of women in the sciences before 1960 were of Ada Lovelace quality. The women who were merely competent weren't allowed to work in the sciences.

This assumes that the same barriers are being put up in front of all candidates, no?

Which the lawsuit we are talking about explicitly alleges is not the case.

> This assumes that the same barriers are being put up in front of all candidates, no?

No, my example very much does not. It's about the exact the opposite, where extra barriers are put in front of one group, but not the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox

& that isn't the point of the lawsuit, I think the point was more that Google misrepresented to her that she'd get paid more than she did after some period of employment and she also believes that there is a gender aspect to that. It isn't reasonable to tell a company that your interpretation of their policies is more correct than theirs.

IMO someone is born yesterday if they buy the "we're not going to agree to that wage now but we will in a while" line from a corporation, but whatever.

It's tough to see the arguments, I can't sympathize with her because doesn't seem to be offering arguments in good faith.

To her credit, gender discrimination is hard to prove and perhaps she felt she really had a strong case (based on the risk she took - this action may close some doors for her), but allowing these arguments to go through really erodes what facade of meritocracy we have left in the industry.

The claims seem to be have gone as far as saying she should have been hired as VP. Her background was senior tech management at a bank, which no doubt is a significant appointment, but I don't think it's easy for anyone to argue that bank tech management easily transfers to big tech.

Giving L8 and presumably a sizeable raise from her bank role means Google already valued her experience very highly. Much more highly than I would have tbh; if someone was top level management in an bank, effectively at least partially responsible for the poor culture of bank tech, and then hired as senior tech management at my company, us grunts would be running for our lives. As she didn't get consistently stellar performance reviews as L8 (which Google uses as argument), the only thing one can argue for is that the performance reviews were biased - which again to her credit tends to be hard to prove - but there's no reason to believe that say a third party looking at those reviews would have given her a promotion.

I also can't fathom someone is arguing in good faith that at this level MS in CS should be a barrier. It should be clear to any Google L8 that MS in CS means absolute jack shit for anyone who manages to get to L6, if not L5. It should only be a factor in junior-ish hiring. For one, Google's technical work even at L6 level can literally shape curriculums at universities. It may just be a legal tactic but I don't want US courts to lend any credibility to this argument, and anyone who wants the court to sanctify this point is basically someone that damages my profession and I don't want near my jurisdiction.

> I'm going to point at "Another male colleague’s background was in physics, not engineering, and he did not satisfy the requirement that candidates have an MS in Computer Engineering" - in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was.

A true milestone in YC’s and HN mods transition to the alt right that the top comment currently on this article is so brazenly sexist. There is nothing curious about unzipping a thesis like this and airing it out. Battle of the Sexes gets won by hard work, team work, and leaving behind the game (“battle”) which was pointless anyways.

In a field of professional endeavour (due to Berkson's paradox) the default position should be that qualifications are a negative signal of quality. That has nothing to do with sexism, it is just a statistical observation. By the magic of it being basic math, it applies to men too!

And women are underpaid relative to men because for the past 4,000 years they have statistically been diverted away from the workforce and into child-raising. By the magic of basic math, that means men are overpaid!

Eugenics is also rooted in basic math and statistical observations. Now that HN has become totally disinterested with social equality, maybe eugenics will fall under ‘curious conversation’ and fill the forums here.

Lol all these people salty at you.

I think you're right that the world of executives is less like "employment" and it's kind of insulting to pretend it is.

But I also think it's fine for executives to sue the companies they represent. I think the government should have a role in corporate governance. I would even support having a government appointed representative like the Federal Reserve has.

But I'm just a communist :p

The replies are missing the point, I agree. “Executives” are part of the bourgeoisie, employment laws bitterly won by the organised proletariat aren’t really relevant.

At the same time, people can sue each other based on laws, why not? If you don’t like that, you should join those working to overthrow the current system.

I think it’s also potentially useful, at least rhetorically, for gender discrimination to be an issue even among the ruling class.

>I don't think it is reasonable for executives - male or female - to sue their employers over promotion decisions

Why? We have all kinds of rules about discrimination, they can and do include promotion decisions.

>We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing.

This would only be true if you assume that interviews are consistently perfect judges of job performance, which is well-known to not be the case.

>Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true.

It isn't special legal protection. It's very regular legal protection. It's the kind of legal protection which should be provided to everybody (and in practice is provided to everybody who can afford a lawyer).

Rich people have the power to fight. Poorer people get the precedent for free.

I do believe that rich parties should pay for their use of precious court time,