Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

Reminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women). It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women! "The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage! Here’s what happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied…

I've thought about the math related to this a bit. Let's say you have a certain (role,level,rating) tuple with 2 women and 8 men. You desire gender equality, and thus say that the average pay for women and men must be equal within a (role,level,rating) tuple, and to do this, you'll raise the salary of the less-paid gender. The women, due to there being less of them, will have an average pay with higher variance than the average pay of…

> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions. This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person…