A group of women have filed a class-action lawsuit that would cover 8,300 women working for Google in California. This is due to gender discrimination towards women. The complaint being filed claims that Google was paying men more than women for doing the same work, denying women promotions, and denying career opportunities to qualified women being “segregated” into lower-paying jobs.
Originally, the civil complaint was in consideration of all women employed by Google in California in the past four years. However, Google fought the suit and a judge dismissed the case. The complaint now moves forward in consideration of a more select group. Google argues that there is a system in place to guarantee no gender pay gap. Google has “pay targets” that are based on industry surveys or the average of what your current employers make. The further their salary is from the target, the bigger raise the employee gets when hired.
On October 30, 2018, Google employees walked out of their job’s to protest the company’s treatment of women. Those who walked out claim that it wasn’t just for women but also for people of color and to do their best to make a difference.
The walkout has a synergy with what we learned in class about baseball because of the sacrifices being made. The protestors may not have been helping themselves by leaving work and speaking out about their own company. Similarly, the baseball players had to form a union and strike in order to make a difference. This meant that they weren’t being paid during their time off and it was hurting their careers, but they had an intention of helping the future of baseball. Google employees want to help their community in the future to ensure that women get equal pay as well, and they are willing to sacrifice themselves to hopefully have a greater future for their company.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/26/google-gender-pay-gap-women-class-action-lawsuit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/04/29/how-the-whats-your-current-salary-question-hurts-the-gender-pay-gap/
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/01/662851489/google-employees-plan-global-walkout-to-protest-companys-treatment-of-women
I'm glad someone made a blog post about this after it was discussed in class because I hadn't heard of it. The connection it has directly to the curriculum we're learning in class in addition to it being so close to home helps put everything in perspective. Let's hope that history progresses the same as it did for the baseball players, it's time for women to acquire equal rights. Similar to the talents of the baseball players, the quality of women is being undermined.
ReplyDeleteThis post identifies an issue that is deeply ingrained within the job markets in the Silicon Valley -- tokenism. In hopes of gaining community support, companies and organizations alike seek to include more women and minority groups in their job positions. However, this is solving the problem of discrimination superficially. As a computer enthusiast myself and having interacted with the working environment in tech, I can verify that internally, there is still an exclusion of minority groups. This exclusion is not a deliberate effort. It is paranoid to think that men and "privileged groups" (I hate that phrase) are actively seeking ways to exploit the minority labor market. A simple explanation of the wage gap is that the company underpays minority groups in order to make more profit, but from my inquiries of female engineers from Google (at hackathons), this is largely false. The issue is much more complex. The position of an engineer can fluctuate dramatically given their level of contribution in project teams. However, the performance of each engineer is evaluated by their co-workers. In other words, team chemistry is a large factor to the salaries of an engineer. Google, with its extremely diverse work environment, puts stress on engineers who are in many cases incompatible with their co-workers. This is not to say that the engineers lack collaborative skills. Needless to say, minority groups, who face institutional discrimination especially in the meritocracy of software engineering, are subject to the bad team chemistry. The lower evaluations from their co-workers take a toll on their salaries. As such, many women participating in the protests are not necessarily victims of corporate cruelty, but the cruelty of systemic discrimination. It is dangerous to analyze this conflict one-dimensionally as a struggle between employers and employees, and I hope that my observations can contribute some nuance to the issue.
ReplyDeleteMany tech companies operate on 7 pay levels for all their employees with specific criteria for promotion to the next level and the amount of time an employee is given to get promoted before they are let go. The idea of pay levels may hurt women if they take time off to have children because they have the pressure of getting promoted but can't put in the hours to get there. This policy really helps the companies reach peek production but it may be hurtful to female employees.
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