Well isn't this just spit in your eye fantastic. Google was on the hunt to find any microagressions it may have committed, what with the tragedy of the gender pay gap leading millions of women to only choose one bottle of wine rather than two for the weekend, when lo and behold Google found it was underpaying its men. Plot twist from The New York Times.
When Google managers initially considered what employees would be paid this year, they decided that more women than men should have their pay adjusted upward to account for factors like how they were compensated relative to their peers, the company said. The money in question came from a discretionary pool earmarked for such purposes.
This is Courtney fielding a guess, but maybe Google decided more women than men should have their pay adjusted because more women than men, as a group, bitch about being under paid.
I'd like to note, mission accomplished. Feminists may be whiny as a group, but dang. It works.
One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers, one of Google’s largest job groups, with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers. To offset that, further adjustments were made. Google said it saw no pattern in the reasons women were receiving more discretionary pay.
A couple of things: Google is a private company and can pay as it sees fit. But already it's looking at people as groups, rather than individuals. The Gender Pay Gap is a topic we've discussed to exhaustion, so for more on the subject I'll direct you here:
But when accounting for life choices, experience, hours worked, and what not, the gap virtually disappears. Because people are groups of individuals, with each person being different than the next, thus compensated differently.
A company like Google and any other would be wise to flip their middle digits to whiny feminists, and even whiny men, and pay people based on each person's worth, not on a much ballyhooed talking point which has been debunked hundreds of times.
