New report reveals massive gender pay gap at Google

Just recently Google came under strict scrutiny after one of its engineers named James Damore wrote a memo in which he argued that biological difference between men and women is the main cause of gender gap at tech industry. However, he was fired from the company. But the debate doesn’t end there, a new spreadsheet obtained by New York Times contains the information of almost 1,200 Google employees both men and women regarding their salaries and bonuses for the year 2017.

The self-reported Google salary spreadsheet was started by a former employee back in 2015 to help co-workers negotiate better salaries. The spreadsheet shows how men and women are being treated at six different payment hierarchy levels at Google. It covers the payment hierarchy from a basic data center worker to experienced engineers. The spreadsheet doesn’t contain the salary or bonus information of high-level engineers or company’s executives.

Among the six levels of payment hierarchy of Google women only in one level earns more than men while in all other five levels men earn more. Below is the chart of comparison of their salary and bonus package.

As one can see in the chart women except for level two are being paid less than men and same goes with bonus package women receive less bonus than men except for level three and level four.

“Silicon Valley has established itself as the boys’ club of the West, just like how Wall Street has established itself as the boys’ club of the East,” said Natasha Lamb, director of equity research and shareholder engagement at Arjuna Capital.

The company said that the information disclosed in the spreadsheet is not up to the mark as it excludes many factors such as where employees are based or in which department they are working or whether they are in higher-paying technical positions or lower-paying technical positions. The company even went on to say that female employee in the company makes 99.7 cents for every dollar a male employee make. Women make 31 percent of the company’s whole work force.

Eileen Naughton, Google’s Vice President of people operations, said that it is possible that a nontechnical person may be same in position as Engineer but will be paid less nonetheless because “there is a premium paid in all markets for highly technical talent.”

It is to be noted here that this spreadsheet data was self-reported by almost 1,200 US employees, which only makes 2 percent of Google’s global work force — meaning this data is not the whole picture and cannot be viewed as an absolute yardstick of company’s policy of paying its employees.

Via: NYTimes