But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.
Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution.
I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."
Seriously, I read that and I immediately wondered who these experts are and what their data actually says, considering the entire article is about how empirical data actually debunked the commonly accepted narrative.
Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served “to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.”
Also, from the article:
“We know that’s only part of the story,” Lauren Barbato, Google’s lead analyst for pay equity, people analytics, wrote in a blog post set to be made public on Monday. “Because leveling, performance ratings, and promotion impact pay, this year, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of these processes to make sure the outcomes are fair and equitable for all employees.”
This is an example of a NYT reporter filling in context so that they don't get pubicly shamed. It seems like a lot of reporters think it's their job to stop readers from reaching the obvious conclusions of their reporting, lest a larger narrative be lost.
I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).
You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.
Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.
> there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises
Or more broadly, supply/demand. There is a heavy demand for female tech workers, which tends to increase their salaries (both when hired and when countering outside offers).
But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.
Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
Etc.