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Is Google Underpaying Female Employees?

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by Thea Voutiritsas

The US Labor Department accused Google of underpaying their female employees compared to males. Silicon Valley isn’t exactly known for its pay equity compliance. Tech company Oracle, data analytics Company Palantir, and Microsoft have all been sued for pay discrepancy issues.

Google has been releasing their own diversity statistics since 2014, though they don’t necessarily prove that the company is diverse. Last year, 31 percent of their workforce were women, 19 percent of tech workers were women, and only 3 percent were Latina and 2 percent were black.

Google denies the charge that there is a gender pay gap in their company, claiming on Twitter that they have “closed the gender pay gap globally, and also provide equal pay across races in the U.S., according to [Google’s] annual compensation analysis.” In response to US Labor Department’s accusation, Google claimed that their remuneration calculations are gender “blind.” Each year, they suggest an amount for every employee’s new compensation based on role, job level, job location and performance.

By Google Inc. (google.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Though Google’s systematic approach to paying employees seems blind at face value, pay equity is far more complicated than whether the salary negotiators know the employee’s gender. That fact that Google’s analysis shows no pay gap, while the US Labor Department’s showed an extreme gap proves just how difficult it is to measure the pay gap to begin with.

While Google’s efforts seem to be transparent, an important thing to note is whether both studies take into account the amount of women in high-paying positions. Just because there may be no pay discrepancy between a woman and her coworker, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a discrepancy between what it takes for a woman to get promoted versus her male counterpart. If men are moving up the chain of command faster than women, then a pay discrepancy cannot be accurately measured against her counterparts.

At the same time, the numbers of women in STEAM careers is relatively low compared to men, which may account for other aspects of the wage gap measured at Google, and all over Silicon Valley. So, while Google may be paying the women that actually do work there the same wages as their male counterparts, they may not be hiring nearly as many women as they do men. This could be due to unconscious biases, or due to a lack of women in STEAM in general.

It’s highly unlikely that Google, as a company, has explicitly decided to promote men more than women, or to pay men more than women. Rather, this may be a symptom of the more insidious was that gender biases can penetrate the workplace. It is easier to perceive men as qualified leaders and innovators because it is what many people in the US are just used to seeing. Whether employers know that they may carry these biases is another story. What we should realize here is that Google isn’t necessarily the bad guy, but the inequities they may incubate are a symptom of a larger cultural problem of inequality.