Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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