Google discovers it's actually been underpaying men

[Terruana]

Side note, but James Damore sounds like a dick. He's not been discriminated against for being male, he was fired for sharing a sexist memo arguing that women are biologically inferior to men.

He didn't actually say that, for the record. People keep saying he said that, but he didn't actually say that.

Did you read the memo?

No, to be fair I did not. I was going by the part of the article which states "James Damore was fired after sharing a memo arguing differences in pay between genders was not due to bias alone, but also biological differences.". What did the actual memo say?

[Terruana]

I just voted "no", and those are basically fake news: the so-called "wage gap" is limited to just one collateral thing within a specific field (low-level programmers), not an actual systemic wage gap, not even close.

I was thinking along similar lines on the first reading, but after going back, the opening paragraph seems to be saying that the most recent study found more men were being underpaid than women, implying it was >50% male employees being underpaid due to gender.
It's not a very clearly worded article though, so I could be reading it wrong.

[Auphelia]

In one job category, a Level 4 Software Engineer, Google says it found it was underpaying men. Google then corrected this by giving raises to thousands of men across the company. The wage increases in total given to men was nearly $9.7 million across around 8,000 male engineers. However, as it has been noted before, the discrepancy did largely result from managers allocating more of their discretionary budget to women, something Google initially had not included in their report.

However, Google is also accused by around 8,300 employees both past and present - who have filed a class action lawsuit - of a practice called levelling, where women hired with the same experience as a man will be assigned to begin in a lower level of a company. As corporations, and Google has stated they do, analyse pay of people at the the same job, at the same level, in the same location and with equivalent performance levels to determine a wage gap, this is not something that is caught. When women are not put on the same level as men relative to their experience, their wages are compared to those of less experienced people, who understandably earn less. When women with years of experience are making the same amount as recent college graduates who are men, and seem equal because they were hired on the same level, that's a problem.

Google widely released their single instance of men earning less (in a very abstract way) than women to distract from their discriminatory hiring practices. The headlines that read "Men Paid Less Than Women" tend to draw attention and distract, to make it seem like not only has Google done its part to end the wage gap, but it accidentally went too far, ignoring the mistakes they have made.

Google is also in the middle of an investigation by the US Department of Labour into whether it has been underpaying women across the board, but has been denying attempts by the US government to look into their wages.

As a company who is in the middle of several legal issues to do with possibly underpaying women, whose workforce is 69% male (79% in tech), and who had employees stage walkouts to protest the way sexual harassment claims were handled, it seems suspicious how they found one tiny instance of men facing the lesser pay and pointed it out.

[Galloism]

He didn't actually say that, for the record. People keep saying he said that, but he didn't actually say that.

Did you read the memo?

No, to be fair I did not. I was going by the part of the article which states "James Damore was fired after sharing a memo arguing differences in pay between genders was not due to bias alone, but also biological differences.". What did the actual memo say?

Basically that while men and women can both be good at tech, they often desire somewhat different working environments, cited a bunch of papers, and made suggestions that by making the work environment more collaborative instead of independent, they might attract more women into it.

He also cited some research that men who are often high skilled at math are often low skilled at language, whereas women who are high skilled at math also tend to be high skilled at language, and while the independent coding environment works for men and women low skilled at language, it's torturous for men and women who are high skilled at language. Since more women are in the latter group than the former, the environment is generally unsuitable to women, and by having both high and low collaboration sections, they could cater to the needs of both men and women.

Roughly. It had more citations, talked a bit about the greater male variability hypothesis (which is fairly well supported, although not universally accepted), and such too.

He did say there were biological differences (which there may or may not be), but he did NOT say biologically inferior. Very specifically he did not in any way allege women were biologically inferior.

[Inkopolitia]

The Patriarchy wins once again.

Just because you don't like the data does not mean it is a sexist conspiracy.

I was being sarcastic... I thought it was pretty obvious.

[LiberNovusAmericae]

Just because you don't like the data does not mean it is a sexist conspiracy.

I was being sarcastic... I thought it was pretty obvious.

Understood. To be fair, I wasn't the only one to make that mistake.

[Neu Leonstein]

This strikes me as a terrible exercise in cherry picking data.

But let's just, hypothetically, say that it was true. Then that would be the free market at work! From the perspective of any corporation now, whether because management genuinely think a more diverse workforce produces better results or because they just want to do it for PR reasons, female and minority technical experts are at a premium. Think of a Google or a Goldman Sachs doing its graduate recruitment right now: whether explicit or implicit, they try to get as close to 50:50 gender splits in their graduate hiring as they can.

But the pool of people graduating from university with suitable degrees is not split 50:50 by gender. Top finance, econ or generally STEM graduates are disproportionately men - a whole bunch of reasons for that, generally worth addressing, but not something that any one company can affect in any one year. So what happens is that the competition for suitable female candidates is fierce. The tools that companies will use to attract those candidates vary (sometimes it's money, sometimes it's just speed in getting offers to them, sometimes it's something else), but I know for a fact (from managers doing the interviews at two different well-known, "high prestige" financial institutions) that they evaluate the success of graduate hiring programs with things like gender balance (among other things).

So in short: I don't think this particular story is what the OP is making it out to be. But I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the female finance or STEM grad would currently find themselves in greater demand than an equivalent male one (generally, and obviously subject to any number of exceptions). And that's not a morally bad thing - it's the market response to a state of disequilibrium.

[Ostroeuropa]

MRAs could have told you this. Before a certain age, the wage gap applies to men with men being paid less than women. It's only when they start having families that the gap reverses.

Considering the wage gap applies to men when they are younger, fresher hires, with less clout at a company, they're going to be overlooked in most analysis unless you actively include every employee.

new hires don't kick and scream about systemic mistreatment like female managers get to.

Any review of wages at a company is going to return a set of males who are being underpaid relative to women, and those men are going to be those at the lower end. Given the nature of income and applying the same rationales behind progressive taxation, as well as the reasons behind the female wage gap being largely that men lack the freedom that women do in work-life balance choices, the notion that the wage gap is a womens issue is a stretch based more on willful ignorance, ideological dogmatism, and misinformation than it is a fact.

Now the male wage gap on the other hand...