[korkoros]

Considering that the company I work for tried to hide their gender pay discrimination by "releveling" all the women who were getting systematically underpaid, you should in fact report these data without disaggregation.

"Those people make less because they are all lower level" is not a mitigating factor for pay discrimination.

[jncfhnb]

As someone who’s done a bunch of DEI analyses for companies, I don’t really believe you understood what you’re saying happened. That really does not make sense. It would be a massive organizational change for some niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at. Does not sound plausible at all. This stuff is genuinely hard to implement.

You absolutely need to normalize for level when determine pay discrepancies. As well as hiring, retention, and promotion rates. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. Frankly a lot of companies fail to do this and are convinced they have huge problems when in fact things are pretty fair at the individual level and on track to gradually diversify over time. But you can’t just snap your fingers and diversify the top of an org. It takes a long time.

[korkoros]

I work for a federal defense contractor that is required to prove in Department of Labor audits that pay is not discriminatory. The possibility of losing those federal contracts is an existential threat to the company. Definitely not "niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at."

The significant restructuring (affected several hundred people) that you describe did in fact occur.

[jncfhnb]

Hmm, no, still don’t believe it. That’s just absurd. I just refuse to believe that they systematically demoted women / promoted men to try and obfuscate pay differences at original levels.

This idea is surely much more expensive to implement than just paying the women more. It’s also fairly easily discovered by an audit of any competence or whistleblower. And the women would surely have a strong negative reaction to this which is an operational risk of them just leaving.

What you are proposing happened is illegal discrimination to begin with, but it’s also really difficult to do. Seems more likely a willing company would prefer to simply lie

[moneywoes]

Very interested, what type of analysis do you do?

[jncfhnb]

Most of the time it’s companies concerned that they’re not doing a good job on equal opportunity stuff. Most of the time (mostly east coast white collar jobs) these orgs are doing just fine. A lot are concerned because top level stats suggest minorities are doing worse. But when you look at hiring, retention, promotions, comp, employee engagement/happiness surveys, they tend to be pretty equal when normalized. Companies that are interested in doing these analyses that I’ve looked at are generally doing the right thing and are on track to diversify to the maximum extent that the candidate pole sensibly allows over time, which is pretty slow, but it’s there. Generally speaking if you’re in a liberal cohort of people you’re not going to see a lot of impact structural biases that hinder folks at the organizational stat level. You very well might at the individual manager level and that’s basically impossible to catch aside from personal conversations and astute leadership.I wouldn’t generalize this across all areas or industries mind you.

To some extent imo, provided an org isn’t overtly discriminatory, the most important thing is to make sure that hiring channels include diverse sources for candidates.

[nostrademons]

There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google, and hiring & promotion rates are tracked by race and gender.

I would bet that the pay discrepancy here is entirely due to differing levels, which in turn is because Google's DEI efforts are ~5-7 years old and when new hires come in at L3, it takes that long or more to get to the high-paid levels. That and people who were hired a while ago are sitting on lots of appreciation in their stock grants.

[jeffbee]

> There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google

There used to be. In the “member of technical staff” era, most new hires were down-slotted within a year.

[nostrademons]

Yeah, there was downslotting back when L5+ came in as MTS.

They got rid of it. I think they changed it to "everyone comes in at L3/L4, and if you're good you'll rapidly get promoted to your true level" around 2012, and then sometime between 2014-2020 it changed to "sure, you can come in at L6+ and we don't really care if you're incompetent".

[joshuamorton]

The numbers here don't take into account stock growth.

Leveling is likely the major component, but thats also a legitimate concern!

[Jensson]

Reporting without disaggregation means that companies would be discouraged from hiring junior women, and that would just make the issue worse not better. Be careful with what you wish for.

[Gareth321]

> “Those people make less because they are all lower level"

Of course it is. People with more experience and higher performance get paid more.

If the accusation is instead that certain groups are being promoted less often because of their immutable characteristics, it requires some evidence to substantiate.

[kyrra]

This has been a mantra of many since the 1990s, and I continues to get proven false (generally). There are so many variables here.

If you want to read a book that directly talks about this, check out Thomas Sowell's "Economic facts and fallacies". There are chapters for both gender and race economic differences. Even though the book is ~14 years old, it counters these kinds of arguments.

[lazide]

It kind of misses the point though - many of the folks saying these things are well aware, but it benefits them. Which is why they say it.

[specialist]

2nd edition 2011.

Has Sowell, or maybe one his acolytes, updated his rhetoric to incorporate the findings of all the ongoing research into the gender pay gap?

[pizzafeelsright]

How is anyone underpaid? If they agree to the negotiated compensation, isn't that equitable?

Let's say there is an employer who systematically wants to underpay women to save money by exploiting the pay gap. If there are no women in agreeing to the pay the employer will adjust upward in an attempt to either hire women or ignore the disparity, pay more, and appear bias.

I would argue that women who want more pay must discriminate more than their potential employer.

[avg_dev]

Often people take what’s offered, whether it is a fair deal or not. Everybody isn’t out there negotiating their best possible rate all the time. Corporations have long taken advantage of whomever they can to earn a buck - it’s a time honored “tradition”.

[randomdata]

That’s not underpaid. To be underpaid normally means one received less than was agreed upon. That scenario is offering a discount, maybe.

If it is true that women are likely to offer discounts, it questions why for-profit companies hire men at all? Meanwhile we worry about companies not being willing to hire women, not men.

[NeoTar]

Five minutes research":

Wiktionary - Underpaid: "Getting too little financial compensation for one's work." Meriam Webster - Underpay: "to pay less than what is normal or required" Cambridge Dictionary - underpay: "to pay (a person) too little" Dictionary.com - underpaid: "not paid enough"

Only the Cambridge version of those could imply (to me) only the definition of receiving less than what was agreed upon.

I personally like the Meriam Webster definition. If a software engineer is normally paid $ X, and you are paying $ 0.5*X, then that person is underpaid.

[randomdata]

> Wiktionary - Underpaid: "Getting too little financial compensation for one's work." Meriam Webster - Underpay: "to pay less than what is normal or required" Cambridge Dictionary - underpay: "to pay (a person) too little" Dictionary.com - underpaid: "not paid enough"

Exactly. There is nothing in there about agreeing to take less than you might have been able to get if you chose to charge more.

> If a software engineer is normally paid $ X, and you are paying $ 0.5X, then that person is underpaid.*

The general opinion is that people are not fungible. Why do you believe that they are?

[josho]

I can only assume you don’t actually want your question answered. Because if you did want an answer you could have asked an ai or searched as there is plenty written on the topic.

I see this pattern all over the place. Often with conservatives. Asking a reasonable question that puts the fundamental concept in doubt. But never actually wanting to know the answer because a simple search would have revealed lots of thorough and existing discussions answering the question.

[pizzafeelsright]

I want to hear from people who hold a different opinion, not academics.

Would this be the fallacy of an appeal to authority?

[josho]

That's fair. Then don't read the search result from the economist. Read the result from the Census, or the Forbes article, or HuffPo if you don't like their stance.

My point is simply that your question is valid, but has been asked and answered a thousand times before. Nothing in your question is specific to this audience that we'd have a twist on the answer that isn't represented in any of the thousand existing answers.

I'm curious, since you didn't get much discussion on your question here, did you take a minute to answer your question elsewhere?

[pizzafeelsright]

I am almost entirely surrounded by either professional people who do not discuss their income or people who share my position. The few discussions I have with people is they tend to agree that people are not conscripted or enslaved so they end up agreeing that they pay gap is caused by the acceptance of an offered compensation.

I am not discussing whether this is fair, equitable, or even kind. I just do not care for the misrepresentation of the situation.

I could argue I am both overpaid or underpaid based upon my perspective. Having been on the other side of the negotiations with friends and strangers the situation is the same. They want as much value as they can extract. I too want as much value as I can extract - within agreement. Now that I am back to being an employee I have requested more compensation. They were open and asked why: apart from desire, I have not provided additional value (yet) and thus am not entitled nor deserving.

[dns_snek]

> Because if you did want an answer you could have asked an ai

You're joking, right? Otherwise why stop at AI? Why not go directly to the source and read Twitter?

[josho]

I'm not joking. This is an area that AI would answer well. It's an issue that's been around for decades and is frequently written about by reputable sources. Like Wikipedia, it's probably a good start for someone like the parent who hasn't given this area much thought.

What makes you think it's a joke?