As businesses, governments and humanity in general work towards creating a more fair and equal world, one topic that comes up again and again is the gender pay gap. Countless studies have shown that women tend to make less money for doing the same job.
One of the world’s biggest tech companies decided to delve in…and the results were extremely surprising.
It wasn’t long ago that women were largely shut out of the workforce.
Many of us have a grandma, or even a mom, whose primary job was homemaker. Just a few decades ago, most jobs — and virtually all well-paying jobs — were held by men.
We’ve made some strides.
Women began trickling into the workforce, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 mandated equal pay for women. But now, more than fifty years later, it seems that women still aren’t getting their share of the pie.
The wage gap is real.
Estimates vary, but a woman doing the same job as a man will make somewhere between 78 and 82 percent of the man’s salary. Clearly, we need to do better in this regard.
Some companies are doing their best.
Google recently conducted a study on whether women and minority groups were being underpaid. Somehow, it seems that Google not only bucked the wage gap trend — they completely turned it on its head.
It’s a big concern in Silicon Valley.
There are tons of high-paying tech jobs, but many of them aren’t attracting women . There’s also the fact that the STEM field is dominated by men . All of this leads to way more men than women working in tech jobs.
Google isn’t exactly doing this out of the goodness of their heart.
Indeed, the company has been under a shadow since 2017, when the Labor Department launched an investigation into whether Google is systematically underpaying women compared to men.
Google’s findings are surprising.
The results of the study found that women were being paid more money than men working in the same roles. It led to pay raises for many male employees. But that’s hardly the end of the story.
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It could be a false reading.
For starters, Google didn’t confirm whether men and women with similar qualifications, hired for the same job, started out with the same base salary. They obviously should — but we don’t know what Google’s internal policy is here.
“Flawed.”
Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company with a focus on diversity, told the New York Times that Google’s internal audit reflects a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality.”
Google agrees, kinda.
The tech giant says that it doesn’t pay women less, but acknowledged that their metrics are not really a complete measure of how fair things are. This leads us to leveling.
It deals with mismanagement.
In a nutshell, leveling is the idea that employees should be paid appropriately for their qualifications. It sounds simple, but putting it into action is another thing entirely.
Employees may have been mismanaged from the start.
Even if a woman makes more than a man, critics say women could potentially make even better money if they were assigned to the proper position and pay grade in the first place.
Google’s facing a lawsuit on this very topic.
Former employees have launched a suit related to gender pay, alleging that male employees were paid better and given more opportunities to advance upward within the company. The suit is still playing out.
It’s an interesting time for Google.
With nearly 100,000 employees, it’s in Google’s best interests to try to keep their house clean. It sounds like a full audit would entail reworking everything related to pay grade — from hiring to promotions to bonuses.
What do you think?
The revelation that Google pays women more than men is surprising, but it’s just the start of a complex story. What are your thoughts? Be sure to let us know in the comments section!
