Or just a lack of drive/desire. In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men. I asked about it when I was first hired and most of the people in the office had been offered management positions at some point during their career and they tuned them down because they'd rather do engineering work than human work.
Looking at the demographics you might suppose that there's a lot of bias and discrimination but it couldn't be further the truth. We just have lot of mobility and many options for salary increases without 'climbing the ladder' so everyone individually wound up where they wanted to be.
>>In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men.
This again creates a new problem of 'Smart engineers' Vs 'Dumb managers'. To a point eventually you get to reducing management to routine supervision work.
In the past I have seen a situation where a program manager was routinely pissed because he was barely able to understand what engineers were talking about. After routinely under estimating time estimates he came to a point where the entire argument on him could be reduced to a rude statement: 'Why don't you stick to your spreadsheet cell filling work, and let us engineers do real work. Work that matters isn't your cup of tea'
I can see where this would go in case of women managers. In only some time, men would be accused of things like 'mansplaining'.
It sounds like your workplace doesn't suffer from the same issues addressed in the article. The women managers at Google were not being offered the same compensation increases, despite performing at or above the level of their male counterparts (all allegedly).
You shouldn't take it on faith that the women were being underpaid. The case will reveal what happened.
You also shouldn't derive from your experiences that just because you have only seen good outcomes, another workplace or team is similarly good. You only know what you actually know.
This is a broad and complex question with many variables, especially the human element and needs deep context to answer. From this I am going to avoid the question as as I get the feeling this becomes 'internet nitpicking' at specifics on a broad issue. But if you'd be more specific in the question I'd be happy to discuss. Apologies if I have misunderstood.
It seems more like a faulty null hypothesis. Instead of assuming zero correlation between ability and pay, some people start from the assumption of perfect correlation.
With regards to ability, we seem to intuit the existence of an unmeasurable "ability factor" that underlies real, measurable metrics of performance. I have no idea how Google measure this kind of thing or any statistics qualifications, but a very dumb first attempt might be to get all the engineers to recommend five top co-workers, break the recommendations up into male/female groups and discard cross-group recommendations, then look at the attributes of the most recommended co-workers in each group.
Looking at the demographics you might suppose that there's a lot of bias and discrimination but it couldn't be further the truth. We just have lot of mobility and many options for salary increases without 'climbing the ladder' so everyone individually wound up where they wanted to be.