Women reboot gender discrimination lawsuit against Google The class-action lawsuit accusing Google of deliberately paying women less than men has been revised and brought back to a US court. Attorneys representing women who worked at the American ad giant as engineers, software managers, program managers, sales staff, and early childhood education (at Google's pre-school/day care …
"Any company would replace set A of workers with set B of workers if set B performs as well as A and costs 20% less."
So, I think then the implication would be: hire MORE women so you can pay them LESS?
And would they be SUING if more then 50% of the employees are women? (yeah, probably would, because the sueball throwers love to throw sueballs)
Yeah there are some confusing indicators out there, because if the perception were correct, you'd see 'Silly Valley' sweatshops filled with single working moms where daycare was company-provided and that helped to justify the lower pay, etc. like "I owe my soul to the company store" snap, snap, snap...
I wish I could find that Dilbert comic where some woman demanded she gets paid the same as the men, and then she gets a 10% pay cut [or something like that].
>Hire qualified women and pay them as per the job. Go to bed early and have an untroubled nights sleep. Wake up refreshed.
Where is the outrage that most truckers are male? Or what about a lack of male hotel maids. Oh wait, we're selective about what jobs we care about when it comes to equality. We should have a law that states male servers must be tipped the same as female servers. So if a female makes more than a male, she must pay the difference. Selective equality is a joke.
It isn't about a comparison between roles or selective equality. It is about person A and person B being employed to do the same role but person A being paid less for no other reason than their gender. If a female trucker is paid less than a male trucker for the same specific job (aren't truckers in the States often self-employed owner-drivers?) then that is wrong, similarly if a male waiter earns less tan a female waitress for the same role and amount of work then that is also wrong. People should be paid based on the job they do and their competency, not because they have two XX chromosomes or an XY pair. In many cases men are best for a particular role and in other roles women excel, but if a man and woman are both good enough to be employed for a particular role and have the same skill sets, experience and tasks to perform I don't see how you can justify paying one less than the other.
"Where is the outrage that most truckers are male? Or what about a lack of male hotel maids!"*
Typical AC. Less balls than the women mentioned.
Should a female trucker get paid less than a male trucker?
Should a female "maid" get paid less than a male "maid"?
Crawl into your pit, the 20th Century is coming to a place near you, and you're getting scared.
* You may of missed the drives to get more men into traditional female roles such as nursing and primary school teaching, but that doesn't match your entrenched sexiest views does it?
Not at all, these women do the best they can. But there is simply a difference in how men and women think and act and the way men and women serve as role models for boys and girls. It would be best for children to be taught by an equal mix of men and women. One is not better than the other, but having a dominance of one over the other is bad. (Having mostly men would be equally bad)
I don't know what he is saying, but I will say that it is a problem to create an environment where all of the authority figures are female, yes. Just as it was a problem with the the principle was pretty much the only male. If ever there were a place were it makes sense to balance the sexes, primary education is it. But...in the US, at least, so many want to be teachers that supply & demand means that teaching is a low-paying profession. And, per my previous observations regarding evolutionary psychology, it is dominated by women. In many grade schools, the only men on staff are the janitors. Unless there is a "security officer".
Not just primary school, secondary too.
When I was at primary in the late 70s, ~50% of my teachers were male.
Secondary the divide was slightly more men.
My kids today - primary is 95% female. Secondary is about 70%.
There's a similar female bias in the NHS - and, no, I dont mean Nurses, most DRs and GPs are female.
Who do I sue?
"There's a similar female bias in the NHS - and, no, I dont mean Nurses, most DRs and GPs are female."
I heard a very interesting observation on this a few years ago from someone who'd recently retired from one of the main GP training medical departments. At that tine there was one of the many recent crises over number of GPs and he pointed out that one of the underlying causes was the increase in women becomnig GPs as due to them being much more likely than male GPs to take time off for maternity and then possibly only returning part time then on average the number of years of work from a female trainee was less than for a male trainee so the number of training places needed to be increased to take account of this ... but nothing had been done as everyone knew it would be career suicide to raise this as an issue.
"Typical AC. Less balls than the women mentioned."
Downvoted because your comment doesn't advance the debate, doesn't address the argument (no matter the lack or presence of validity) and seeks to resolve by attacking the poster in ad hominem fashion.
Abandon the emotive response, address the argument as presented (even when its dumb as shit, from your viewpoint) and stop making assumptions about the opposition.
A lesson many parties in these debates should learn.
"There was 72 genders last time I looked. "
Baring a few extremely rare genetic disorders they are all clearly either male or female at birth. That's what they are regardless of what they might want to pretend to be. Just check what it says on the birth certificate if not sure...
"Hire qualified women and pay them as per the job"
But the market value of women is lower. For instance many small business owners wouldn't dream of hiring a woman of child baring age.
Therefore If you advertise a low paid job you will get better qualified women willing to work for it than men. So you end up paying women less through market forces.
"But the market value of women is lower. For instance many small business owners wouldn't dream of hiring a woman of child baring age."
Why the hell not? Is it because there is a presumption that a pregnant woman or new mother needs a lot of time off work? My wife worked up until a week before my daughter was born and then she and I split the parental leave period for a new child nearly equally. This was supported by both our employers and by new legislation about parental leave (yeah, bye bye maternity vs paternity leave!).
Neither of our value have been lowered by being parents. The continued assumption that only women can look after children and men cannot is part of the issue. Do you consider it "babysitting" when you have to look after your own children, or is it childcare or parenting? Ask your employer the same question. The answer you get can be very illuminating.
Bernard
I may be wrong but I am assuming you do not run a small business? Forgive me if this is not the case.
The problems caused by maternity leave in a small business are significant and expensive to resolve. Short term cover is required, which tends to be more expensive. You are not allowed to ask if/when the employee intends to return. They can agree to return then decide against doing so the day beforehand. If they are in a sales role then someone has to manage their clients in this period and then hand them back upon the, as yet, unscheduled return.
Small businesses find this difficult and expensive to manage. That, sadly, is fact.
"The problems caused by maternity leave in a small business are significant and expensive to resolve"
I've run a small business in the past, but I never had to deal with maternity as it happens (it was a short lived thing, alas). You raise some good points, but for me those point to a failing in legislation rather than a reason to employ men over women. My point was that parental leave can be shared between parents and there shouldn't be an assumption, either by legislation, the parents or the employer, that the onus would automatically fall upon the mother to "give up their career to be a parent", or that all benefits and responsibilities are those of the mother, de facto.
"You guys always miss out the third option.
Hire qualified women and pay them as per the job. Go to bed early and have an untroubled nights sleep. Wake up refreshed."
Only an option if they actually exist. Which they don't, statistically. We get very few women apply for jobs in our department, and they are even more rarely the best candidate, so we have <30% women working here. I cannot see how this is somehow our fault.
Probably not your fault unless your office is at the end of a long dark road with no public transport and surrounded by prisons, psychiatric hospitals, wolves and cannibals. There are obviously other drivers influencing women's career choices and expecting it all to be magically fixed at the corporate level is leaving things a bit late. As an exercise in trolling it would be interesting to chart women leaving technical industries with the increasing proportion of women in school teaching roles. Are young women not reaching for some industries because of a lack of accessible role models (male or female) to inspire and teach them technical skills.
" I cannot see how this is somehow our fault."
You've not being paying attention in Social Conditioning Class, have you? The feminsisters* have been yelling "Because patriarchy!" for some time now, and they're getting proper loud lately.
*not a typo. A response to the nonsense that is "mansplaining".
Well said, but you forgot one (sort off, because mine is from the employee's pov):
"If you feel to get underpaid then don't agree with the job offering in the first place".
They make it sound as if salary differences are all based on gender, but in most companies a difference in salary even occurs amongst men as well as amongst women. That's the part which is carefully left out of the equation here.
You sir a full of sh***.
The best ISP sysadmin I have worked with is woman. The best QAs I have worked with are women. Some of the best embedded C++ developers I have worked with are women too. Some of the best DBAs, etc.
This reminds me a legendary dialogue between a US Bank and a well known high end outsourcing/development shop in Bulgaria (*). The shop in question specializes in fraud detection and analysis systems for banking, elections, etc and is used by quite a few Tier 1 banks and some western governments including projects that are not usually spoken of (unless you want to be run over by an unmarked van).
So the US Bank exec looks at the staff roll which is 30%+ women and at the benefits package which contains things like 1 year fully paid maternity leave and blows a gasket about broads and not paying for something which is the fault of the broad who should not have gone pear-shaped. At that point the owner of the shop looks at him and says: "You sir have no clue what is required to do this stuff. Software developers with university degrees and appropriate level of knowledge in statistics, AI and domain knowledge do not grow on trees. In any case, it is quite clear we will not get along, please leave the building".
(*)I am omitting the actual names to protect the guilty - they are well known.
Which means there won't be any women in IT at all.
Assuming you didn't forget the joke icon, I'm curious about your definition of IT. IT is a broad based term for all the actual jobs carried out in the IT industry - I can probably reel off 40 or 50 different job roles just from the one area I work in (of which computer programming would be just one). To clarify what I mean think about your sentence but imagine you used the phrase 'health care' instead of IT and you can see how absurd it appears. Some jobs within the IT industry may be more suited to men, and others more suited to women, the same as in the health care industry (most surgeon's are men I believe, and most mid-wives are women), but to say that women shouldn't work in IT is just stupid.
I'm quite happy saying that (consistently) incompetent people shouldn't work in IT regardless of any consideration, be that being a friend or relation to somebody senior or other consideration such as gender or ethnicity. Computers don't care about the details of the person inputting the commands, and nor do I.
But singling out a group of people beyond the dangerously incompetent, which working in operations I personally define as those who break production systems that jobs (and when i've been working at the NHS, potentially lives) rely on is unacceptable.
When it comes to pay, if some people are twice as productive or working twice the hours as some others and get paid twice as much, fair enough. But if there are two equally qualified people employed in the same roles doing the same hours and producing the same level of work output then the pay should also be equal.
The third option is to hire best person to do the job.
Which means there won't be any women in IT at all.
Wow. That is just so wrong I hardly know where to start.
I'm about the least progressive person you'd want to work for or with, because I don't buy any of the diversity BS. Diversity isn't a strength any more than it is a weakness. Just hire the best person for the job and don't sweat their gender, age, race, sexual preferences, whatever....
But if you're seriously going to claim that none of the women I work with or have worked with are there on merit, then I'm going to call BS on that. Programming, or indeed any other aspect of IT, neither requires standing up to pee or the lifting of heavy objects, thus must be a gender neutral role.
The female luminaries in our industry are many, as are the men. Yes, people outside of our industry complaining that there should be more women in IT do have a massive blindspot when it comes to work such as emptying the bins, oil rigs, mines, road construction etc, but that is their issue and their blindspot - let's not project that onto women within IT, because from my lengthy experience, they are all there on merit.
I simply cant grasp the correlation between good code and genitalia.....
Doing your bosses work?
Isn't that how it always works? That's par the course, if I had a pay rise for every time I did my bosses work I'd be rich.
I am all for equal pay but at least get the argument right, I'm sure there are equal examples of women getting people working under them to do the work.
Well maybe you should learn some negotiation skills. "Sorry, boss but I'm not paid at a level to do that." Is a line I've said before, pissed off quite a few bosses doing it, but they dont do it more then a couple of times before they learn that I'm not doing there job for them. And when appraisal time comes around, with HR in the room, and if your lucky your bosses boss as well, "Well considering how you wanted me to do managerial work for you, outside of the scope of my contract, I guess that means you think I'm ready for a promotion to a higher level?" or something similar puts your boss in the position of being unable to say that you were not a high performer...
And when appraisal time comes around, with HR in the room, and if your lucky your bosses boss as well,
Or you can work in a company like the one I used to work in. Appraisal carried out by your peers and reported back to your reviewer (usually one grade higher only so not management). Reviewers (about 40 of them) then meet up and go through about 150 staff members deciding where on a matrix they sit. A manger and HR representative is there to chair and take notes, as well as ensure that any particular opinion they have about a staff member is enforced (good or bad). The specific staff members are not involved at this point and have no effective ability to appeal because they do not know what is said at the meeting - just their final grade.
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