They found systemic compensation disparities against women
Speaking of systemic obstacles thrown in the path of women in STEM – Google does its part.
Google has discriminated against its female employees, according to the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said it had evidence of “systemic compensation disparities”.
As part of an ongoing DoL investigation, the government has collected information that suggests the internet search giant is violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women, agency officials said.
“We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday.
Stay in STEM, girls – and if they pay you less than they pay the boys, just stay later and arrive earlier.
Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: “The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”
Herold added: “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.”
Google denies it.
Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department’s office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review.
Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL’s lawsuit. After the suit was originally filed, a company spokesperson claimed that Google had provided “hundreds of thousands of records” to the government and that the requests outlined in the complaint were “overbroad”, revealed confidential information, or violated employees’ privacy.
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t told the DoL to drop the case.
Google is not the first tech company to face legal action from the labor department over employment practices. In September, the DoL filed a lawsuitagainst Palantir, the Palo Alto data analytics company, alleging it systematically discriminated against Asian job applicants in its hiring process. Palantir has argued that the DoL’s analysis was flawed and the company has denied the accusations.
In January, the department sued Oracle, another large tech company, claiming it paid white men more than others, leading to pay discrimination against women and black and Asian employees. Oracle claimed the case was “politically motivated” and said its employment decisions were based on merit and experience.
In recent months, there has been uncertainty about the future of these kinds of aggressive DoL enforcement efforts under Donald Trump. The president has rolled back Obama-era protections for female workers, and some DoL staffers have raised concerns that the new administration will not embrace the agency’s core mission of supporting workers’ rights. An Oracle executive also joined Trump’s transition team, and the president’s close adviser Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir.
Any bets on how long it will take the Trump gang to shut that whole thing down?
Robert Reich – Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, don’t forget – said this:
When I visited Google several weeks ago, several women took me aside to mention how badly they were treated in terms of pay and promotions.
Shame on Google. It ought to be a model of equal opportunity for women rather than a model of gender bias. (By the way, I hope Trump’s new pick for Labor doesn’t stop this lawsuit.)
Drain that swamp.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least, although I suspect it’s even worse elsewhere (and better elsewhere). There’s a number of factors that go into fixing it, but as long as companies regard salaries as “confidential information” (people do realize that this is an anti-labor stance, I hope, designed to keep employees from figuring out the actual market worth of their skills and experience, and to keep them from finding out the systemic biases in pay; it also serves to make the underpaid embarrassed if they do find out — clearly it’s their own fault for poor negotiating and just maybe not being as good at their job — so they don’t seek redress), it won’t change.
Also, asking what you currently make needs to go from the interview process. 1) men (as a whole, not every single one) lie and boost their salary to up the offer from the hiring company, while women tell the truth (again, not all — I liked about this once, because I figured out all of the above) and 2) the hiring company knows what market rate is, they don’t need to know your current salary, they already have a range that the position will pay.
Basically, labor has been so thoroughly broken, we don’t recognize that there are systemic labor-management issues intersecting with the sexists ones (and vice versa, looking at you, Bernie Sanders.) And the left seems full of further attempts to splinter ourselves into further irrelevance.
(Apologies for any typos and poor structure — typing on a phone.)
Of course, we will not be able to fix it until we fix other systemic problems in our society.
(1) The idea that companies have a right to make money has been translated into the idea that companies have a right to make obscene profits, and anything that reduces those profits are inherently bad
(2) The idea that if an employer increases wages, it will harm the poor, who will end up paying higher prices for products (but you never hear the counter, that with increased wages, the poor will be making more money)
(3) The idea that any sort of cap on the salaries of corporate bigwigs tied to the employee salary (i.e., can only make so much percentage more than employees) is an ungodly, anti-American interference in business
(4) The idea that paying women more will hurt women, because they will no longer have those choices, as the companies will once again start preferring men, if they have to pay them the same anyway
(5) The idea that women have “different brains” and therefore, by default, “inferior brains”, and that they are hardly ever at work because they are always off having babies, taking care of babies, and/or thinking about, dreaming about, obsessing over babies
(6) The idea that “bitches ain’t shit”.
Until we manage to fix society to recognize that women and non-white men are completely capable of doing equal work with white men, we will not fix the wage gap. And since corporations manage to make so much more money by underpaying all people who are not white and/or not male, there is no incentive to work toward fixing this.
Systemic, yes.