SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Google Finds It's Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity
When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year, but the latest findings arrived as Google and other companies in Silicon Valley face increasing pressure to deal with gender issues in the workplace, from sexual harassment to wage discrimination.
Gender inequality is a radioactive topic at Google. The Labor Department is investigating whether the company systematically underpays women. It has been sued by former employees who claim they were paid less than men with the same qualifications. And last fall, thousands of Google employees protested the way the company handles sexual harassment claims against top executives.
Critics said the results of the pay study could give a false impression. Company officials acknowledged that it did not address whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications.
In response to the study, pay raises were given out to 10,677 employees, with men accounting for 69% of Google's employees but an undisclosed higher percentage of the raises.
Google blog post. Also at Ars Technica, NPR, and TechCrunch.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:23PM (8 children)
Wait a sec-- Google didn't know something so basic about itself? Biggest and perhaps best search engine in the world, pioneers in big data, harvesters and hoarders of private data the better to target those ads, the computing power to run millions of searches every hour, close to 100,000 employees, and they only check their own wage equality once a year? WTF??
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday March 05 2019, @09:51PM
They did check. They do know.
This way, they get plausiblility to add to the obfuscation about wage oarity
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday March 06 2019, @12:13AM (6 children)
Well, if Google's internal data search capability is anything like its search engine, I can completely understand how employees wouldn't know what the hell was going on inside the company.
Biggest? Yeah, probably. Best? Eh... been going downhill for the past 10-15 years. Well, that's if you actually want a search engine -- you know, something that allows you to find stuff you SEARCH for. For more than a decade, Google has been morphing into something more like social media... it sees what it thinks you like, and then it tries to give you a bit more of that, regardless of what you actually want, sprinkling in some ads and sponsored links (and probably gaming the ranking for profit). If you ask it for something obscure, it assumes you're an idiot and must want to see a cat video or celeb news.
I remember distinctly when the decline started. Y'all remember when Google used to allow you to see a cached version of many sites? I know it ran into legal trouble over caching and copyright, but I'm pretty sure they would've gotten rid of it anyway, because if you remember the cached versions you could see back ca. 2007, it would highlight your search terms when you viewed the cached version. Pretty useful actually. Until you started to realize that sometimes Google would have top links that didn't contain your search terms at all -- and it would actually tell you that. But it would also claim that the search terms were in prominent sites that linked to those sites -- so, I figured at the time, "Hey, they know search -- they probably know this does good things most of the time."
But then it started to really break down. In the 2010-12 timeframe, Google permanently broke verbatim search. It has been impossible to search full-text in any reasonable way for about a decade on Google. I'm sure they have AI algorithms they claim were helping more users find "what they want," but I found it increasingly difficult to do serious research. Google Books when it first appeared was amazing for research, but over the years it became completely unreliable -- results would show up or disappear based on random changes in your search parameters. E.g., you look for sources between 1910 and 1920 for some obscure terms, and you get 12 hits from the years between 1915 and 1920. Then you change the search parameters to 1915 to 1920 only, and now you get 7 hits only from those years, 3 of which you didn't see in the other search from 1910-20. I'm talking about the COMPLETE results. WTF?
Seriously. When this stuff first started happening, I thought I was going nuts. Remember back around 2002 when Googlewhacking was a thing? You could search for a couple unique words, and get exactly one hit. Really cool. And other people could see it too. Now, Google became this weird thing that returned completely unreliable results.
And it's only gotten worse over the years. I could detail the further degradation, as obscure vocabulary words gradually got replaced in searches with similarly spelled but different words... as it became next to impossible to find anything. Yes, Google claims you can use "verbatim" -- it claims you can use quotes. No, you can't. Real researchers have known this has been broken for nearly a decade. What shows up even in complete lists of links is dependent on all sorts of weirdness -- even if you use an "anonymized" Google with no personal data to filter bubble your terms, the order of your terms even in verbatim changes the actual complete list of links that shows up.
Just the other day, I saw a particularly blatant BS set of links. A child in my extended family has been all excited over some wacky show called The Masked Singer. I somehow got co-opted into viewing the finale, and I guessed who the final reveal was. Everyone was amazed. So I got curious -- who else might have predicted it along with me? Well, I was watching it after the initial airdate, so Google was of course full of links to all the news about the final reveal. Easy-peasy, though, right? Use "search tools" to narrow down the date range. Google has disabled custom date range on mobile, because they hate freedom and think nobody wants real tools, so I had to use the desktop version, but there I went -- restrict end date to the day before the show aired, and let's see who predicted this conclusion?
Nope -- try it, I dare you. What I found is literally 15 out of the top 20 links (I think) were to pages deliberately dated after the last date I had requested in my explicit custom date search. I'm not talking about bad news sites that postdate pages dishonestly -- I'm talking about Google at the top of the page saying, "Showing pages before February 27, 2019 (or whatever the date was) and below it more than half of the links showing after that.
That's what the "best search engine in the world" can do for you.
Now, given all that, imagine if Google's internal data is processed in a similar fashion -- angry female employees only see bits of data that show them to be grossly underpaid, angry male-activist types who hate the last group only see data showing that all the women are wrong. It's impossible to ever get the same results on a similar query. Managers throw up their hands as they can't get anything consistent out the data and instead take to watching cat videos, because they once searched for one that a friend mentioned on YouTube last year, and ever since all they see are cat videos suggested along with ads for cat litter and old-lady underwear.
Then, one day each year, three senior engineers, each with their own unique key hanging around their neck, approach the vault in the basement together. In synchronized motion, they turn their keys simultaneously and enter the dark chamber wherein lives the One True Server, the only one in the building still capable of responding to a literal query. They approach it together and ask it questions about salary data... and they are astounded! Every time! Because nobody who uses Google knows WTF the data out there actually looks like, so why should Google understand it internally?
I'd pay lots of money just to have access to the Google search engine of the early 2000s. I understand that AI and fancy algorithms are needed to deal with the quantity of info out there nowadays, but Google isn't the "best" compared to what it used to be. It's a data behemoth that has lost its way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @01:24AM (1 child)
I've seen them going downhill for years.
I'm possibly the reigning world champion for using various search box tricks to try to narrow down searches or make them more specific, only to be told after a bunch of incremental efforts that I must be a bot, so no Google for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:26PM
I have to use chrome to bypass some of their capthca bullshit. Using FF with some add ons fails the ve capthca every time. Basically Google is putting road blocks on the web that require you let them identify you.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 06 2019, @01:39AM
Huh, much worse than I imagined. Sounds like a bad case of too many fingers in the pie.
I haven't noticed, because I switched to Duck Duck Go years ago. I only try other search engines, including Google, when DDG turns up nothing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:32AM
You speak the truth. I didn't feel it was much of a downgrade to switch to DDG. Not that DDG is as good as Google used to be. But I can get some results without feeding the monster.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
I have lots of money. And I'm not the biggest fan of Google. What's the best Search?
(Score: 4, Funny) by chromas on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:17AM
Bing, if you're looking for porn. And you are.