Pay discrimination at Google is back in the news
Alphabet workers news
The Guardian has published an article today with an update about an ongoing gender discrimination case against Google dating back to 2017. The plaintiffs are seeking class status, which if granted would extend the lawsuit to cover nearly 11,000 women.
Personal anecdote: I was a first-level manager in Google's network IT ("netops-corp") team from 2011 to 2016. There was an incident in which Google attempted to apply its "prior pay determines starting salary" negotiating policy to a woman who was hired to join my team. Normally the first-level manager isn't involved in salary discussions, but in this particular case I ended up seeing the offered salary prior to the offer-extended letter going out. I noticed that the woman would be dramatically underpaid compared to the men on my team who were at the same level, flagged this as an equity issue to my second-level manager, who flagged it to the finance team that writes the compensation letters, who got it changed and significantly bumped up the starting salary before the offer letter went out. This particular adjustment was completely invisible to the candidate, since the change was made prior to the offer being mailed. My suspicion, however, is that this example of an upward salary correction is the minority case. It took three levels of management to make the change happen -- two within the network team and at least one person on the offer approvals team. Everybody in the decision chain had to agree that it was a problem and take action to do something about it, and the fix could have been blocked anywhere along the decision path. It seems quite plausible to me that until California banned employers from asking about prior salary history in January 2018, there may have been thousands of cases at Google in which pre-Google pay discrimination propogated forward into people's starting salaries.
If you're working at Google, remember to fill out the employee-run, employee-maintained "share my salary" survey each year so that you can increase the shared pool of information among workers and give your coworkers some of the data that they need to fight back against pay inequity. Sharing your salary is a protected activity under U.S. labor law.
Some extracts from the Guardian article appear below.
- Bruce
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www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/22/google-gender-pay-discrimination-lawsuit
Women at Google miss out on thousands of dollars as a result of pay discrimination, lawsuit alleges
An ongoing 2017 case found that discriminatory practices may be pushing women into lower-paying career tracks
Women at Google lose out on thousands of dollars each year compared with men as a result of discriminatory practices including pushing female employees into lower-paying career tracks, a lawsuit has alleged.
The findings stem from an ongoing lawsuit brought against Google in 2017, which accused the tech company of gender pay discrimination between female employees – from coders to teachers in its in-house childcare department – and their male counterparts...
The women affected encompass a large variety of positions, and more than half are software engineers...
“Google has a pattern and practice of channeling women with comparable education and experience into lower-salary levels,” James Finberg, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case said.
The former employees bringing the lawsuit against Google have alleged the company tied starting salary to prior pay, perpetuating wage inequality...
The discovery process revealed a number of systemic discriminations, including that 49% of people hired as Level 2 software engineers were women but that percentage dropped for higher level positions – 22% for Level 3, 14.2% for Level 4, and 7.2% for Level 5. [Plaintiff Kelly] Ellis said that when she was hired, she was asked what she was paid at her previous job and given the same salary at Google.
“I didn’t really realize the full extent to which I was discriminated against until I stopped working there, and I realized even more being involved in this lawsuit just how blatant and what a pattern it all was,” Ellis said...