New York Times: Even Google Can No Longer Hide Its Gender Pay Gap

By Bryce Covert

7 March 2019

On Monday, Google announced something unusual: After its annual pay equity analysis, it gave most of the raises to adjust for unequal practices to men.

The company says that it was about to make changes this year that would have compensated many men less than women in a certain job category, so it headed off that inequity. But the analysis appears to leave out many of the factors that women at the company say have led them to be paid less. The company’s annual reviews only compare people in the same job categories, yet women say the problem is that they are hired into lower-tier and lower-pay positions while men start in higher-level jobs with higher pay brackets.

It’s hard to know for sure what’s going on with Google’s wage gap, because the company won’t release all of its data publicly. In prior years it claimed that it had no gap in pay between men and women, while arguing that it shouldn’t have to hand over detailed data to the Department of Labor, which analyzes pay practices at government contractors. Yet in 2016 the Labor Department found that Google had “systemic” disparities, which an official called “quite extreme.”

A new rule could help make sense of what’s going on. 

Read the full article in the New York Times.