Google says it would cost too much to gather wage gap data

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Just now, Carclis said:

That's rubbish.

No, there really is research done by industry.

Just now, Carclis said:

 You have to look at exact same occupations within the same industry and company, including age, experience and time with a company 

Like, for example, the third paper I posted?

[FakezZ]

2 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Exactly. You need to quantify this effect, and other effects - it's what they do.

While always possible, then the burden of proof lies on you: if you want to argue that a particular study omitted a relevant factor, you must say what that factor is, why it matters, and if possible how would you expect the results to change (i.e., if the order of magnitude can plausibly make a substantial difference).

That's just spurious correlations. What these studies are doing are way beyond that - that kind of correlation is what gives you the "40% gap" (or whatever in each country) misleading claims you often find in the media.

 

There is uncertainty in science in general, it's the cards we have  We build our knowledge of anything based on "theories not debunked yet", and improve on the basis of debunking older theories and coming up with new ones compatible with a wider range of facts.

 

I said that there are always factors in economics and the markets which cannot be taken into account. For example this guy looks like an asshole, I will pay him less, this girl is hot I will pay her more, this guy likes rock I will pay him more etc. The interactions are so complex that no study on the subject can ever be right about the causes of this or even if the number in the end is correct. Yes of course there is uncertainty in science, but unlike economics in physics for example I can test the Law of Universal Gravitation and it will work 10/10 times, but with economics there is no way you can say this behavior is explained by this and this is the exact factor because under the exact same circumstances you can get a completely different result in testing it.

[Carclis]

7 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

No, there really is research done by industry.

That's not what I said. It takes a very careful study to back up a claim as silly as this one. The only way to prove it is by being scientific about it. Without having all other factors equal it's impossible to compare genders to search for any gap in wages between the genders without producing biased results. Industry is just a blanket for many occupations and it's silly to think that would produce even remotely accurate findings.
 

7 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Like, for example, the third paper I posted?

Conveniently the pay per view article huh?

[SCHISCHKA]

2 hours ago, Mitchell B said:

Explaining that it would cost too much and require too much time.

SELECT SUM(SALARY) FROM EMPLOYEE_TABLE WHERE PENIS=1;

SELECT SUM(SALARY) FROM EMPLOYEE_TABLE WHERE PENIS=0;

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 minute ago, FakezZ said:

I said that there are always factors in economics and the markets which cannot be taken into account. For example this guy looks like an asshole, I will pay him less, this girl is hot I will pay her more,

That's actually been done as well  

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9516.html

 

1 minute ago, FakezZ said:

 The interactions are so complex that no study on the subject can ever be right about the causes of this or even if the number in the end is correct.

That's too much of a stretch. Having all the factors that can possibly matter can be nearly impossible, but that is not what it takes to reliably isolate the effect of one variable or another (for example, anything that can be done in a lab experiment will only need a bit of randomization, even if you ignore all other determinants).

1 minute ago, FakezZ said:

Yes of course there is uncertainty in science, but unlike economics in physics for example I can test the Law of Universal Gravitation and it will work 10/10 times

I don't know what you mean by testing the law of gravitation. You can drop things, and they will fall. 

Now, does his theory hold as he formulated? Certainly not 10/10 times. In fact, we discovered planets thanks to it failing, until we ran out of hidden planets - then relativity had to take over  

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/#406889ef48e7

 

1 minute ago, FakezZ said:

, but with economics there is no way you can say this behavior is explained by this and this is the exact factor because under the exact same circumstances you can get a completely different result in testing it.

I would love to see an example of such falisification. I mean, of course it can happen, and when it does, it means the explanation was not correct. But that doesn't mean that there aren't results that you can replicate over and over again (like, for example, the wage gap  And still that's just a stylized fact, not a theory - theories only come into place to interpret it. These studies already incorporate all the plausible theories we have so far on what could account for it, and whenever someone has a new good idea, excellent: time to publish  )

 

 

5 minutes ago, Carclis said:

That's not what I said. It takes a very careful study to back up a claim as silly as this one. The only way to prove it is by being scientific about it. Without having all other factors equal it's impossible to compare genders to search for any gap in wages between the genders without producing biased results. 

That's exactly what a sound econometric methodology does.

5 minutes ago, Carclis said:

 

Conveniently the pay per view article huh?

Conveniently the I am to lazy to Google attitude, huh?

It's time to get banned, so LMGTFY...

The working paper abstract is even better at giving you all the relevant information in a nutshell.

 

 

[Mooshi]

The only wage gap is the Canadian economy.

[Carclis]

19 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Conveniently the I am to lazy to Google attitude, huh?

It's time to get banned, so LMGTFY...

The working paper abstract is even better at giving you all the relevant information in a nutshell.

I'm too lazy to search for unicorns. Anyways going by the abstract:
 

Quote

In this paper, we study the extent to which wage differentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity, disparities in friction patterns, segregation, and wage discrimination. For this purpose, we propose an equilibrium search model that features rent-splitting, on-the-job search, and two-sided heterogeneity in productivity. The model is estimated using German matched employer-employee data. Overall, the results reveal that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males. In addition, female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts.

I will read more later but it seems obvious what the results found suggest already. Employees are paid on the basis of their productivity ie worth and as a result less productivity warrants less bargaining power. Does that seem like a fair assumption?

 

Additionally, think about these questions:

If laws forbid employers from discriminating between employees based on gender by paying females/males less then why would companies do it?

If females are paid less than men with all other factors equal then why would anybody in their right mind employ men with them being more costly to hire?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Just now, Carclis said:

I will read more later but it seems obvious what the results found suggest already. Employees are paid on the basis of their productivity ie worth and as a result less productivity warrants less bargaining power. Does that seem like a fair assumption?

It's not that productivity determines their bargaining power, but that they get paid as a function of both: how productive a worker-firm match is, and the bargaining power they have to split that surplus with the firm. The bargaining power is a "reduced form" parameter, i.e., it ends up capturing the factors not explicitly accounted for (but is less arbitrary than a simple residual)

Just now, Carclis said:

If laws forbid employees from discriminating between employees based on gender by paying females/males less then why would companies do it?

For several reasons:

1) firms do all sorts of illegal things all the time, so they may try to get away with it if for whatever reason they want to (showing that something happens on average in the economy is not the same as having evidence that company A did it to worker B in year C)

2) Because decisions within companies are made by people, and the people making decisions have their own biases.

3) As mentioned in previous posts, statistical discrimination: supposed you have two identical workers, one female, one male. They are equal in all relevant respects. However, if the female worker ever gets pregnant, takes maternity leave, and joins back later, that will cause some additional costs to the firm, and she may not be as productive as the male in the future (or herself! in the alternative scenario in which she doesn't take the time off). The firm doesn't know if and when this will ever happen. It just knows that it happens with x% of female workers, but only y<x% of males (except the pregnancy part, but it doesn't matter ). Ideally, the firm would like to know if this particular female worker will entail some additional costs or not, but it doesn't, maybe she doesn't know either (and it's illegal to ask). So, what the company does is to pay somewhat less to its female workers: it will still make a loss in the cases in which the extra costs materialize, but it will compensate it with underpaying the females that never generate additional costs. It is "discrimination" because it's not based on the actual worker productivity; in fact, at the time of making the decision, she is as productive as he is. It is "statistical" because it's not coming from "I hate women, let's pay less", but from actual expected costs and benefits from the pool of workers she belongs to. A competitor firm paying full wage to all workers wouldn't be better off, because a fraction of its workers would generate those extra costs, and it's not compensating with anything. This type of differential can be very pervasive, as all firms have incentives to follow the statistical discrimination pattern.

 

Just now, Carclis said:

If females are paid less than men with all other factors equal then why would anybody in their right mind employ men with them being more costly to a hire?

Based on the last 2 points above:

1) because the people making the decisions are biased in their performance assessments ("behavioral" explanation)

2) because of statistical discrimination, which implies that men are not overall more costly than women ("rational" explanation). If you want, in that case the gender wage gap would be as much a matter of fairness between men and women as a matter of fairness between women.

[Tech_Dreamer]

they can harvest & track more than a billion peoples data & analyze em & keep up with the trends near real time & they cant do this? sounds fishy!

[vanished]

How can it possibly cost that much?  It should be a single database query, and if it's not, something is seriously wrong.  Considering this is a huge and very successful tech company, this statement seems at odds with reality, since it suggests a level of organization and capability far lower than what would be necessary for them to accomplish what they do on a daily basis, leading me to think this is a nonsense excuse to hide something.

[Carclis]

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

The working paper abstract is even better at giving you all the relevant information in a nutshell.

The paper again represents everything wrong with the way they're looking at the data:

There's no point in collecting data if the institutions doing so don't even know how to extract meaningful information from it. It's obvious in this case that the information extracted wasn't geared towards discovering if there is a wage gap or not because broad industries are used and hours worked are not taken into consideration .

 

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

For several reasons:

1) firms do all sorts of illegal things all the time, so they may try to get away with it if for whatever reason they want to (showing that something happens on average in the economy is not the same as having evidence that company A did it to worker B in year C)

2) Because decisions within companies are made by people, and the people making decisions have their own biases.

3) As mentioned in previous posts, statistical discrimination: supposed you have two identical workers, one female, one male. They are equal in all relevant respects. However, if the female worker ever gets pregnant, takes maternity leave, and joins back later, that will cause some additional costs to the firm, and she may not be as productive as the male in the future (or herself! in the alternative scenario in which she doesn't take the time off). The firm doesn't know if and when this will ever happen. It just knows that it happens with x% of female workers, but only y<x% of males (except the pregnancy part, but it doesn't matter ).

But that is kinda redundant when you could just make the female worker redundant should she become pregnant (also illegal and unethical I know). It also seems like an easier card to play to say that the company was overstaffed at the time compared to the "there is no pay difference between genders" which would not be all that hard to prove wrong.

 

8 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

How can it possibly cost that much?  It should be a single database query, and if it's not, something is seriously wrong.  Considering this is a huge and very successful tech company, this statement seems at odds with reality, since it suggests a level of organization and capability far lower than what would be necessary for them to accomplish what they do on a daily basis, leading me to think this is a nonsense excuse to hide something.

I suspect that's because Google is a special snowflake in that it might actually pay female employees more since females are not very common in their industry and it would require a lot to attract them to the company. This is because they seem to have a "tick all the boxes" approach to employment which strives to create diversity through primarily employing people based on personal characteristics. 

[vorticalbox]

55 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

How can it possibly cost that much?  It should be a single database query, and if it's not, something is seriously wrong.  Considering this is a huge and very successful tech company, this statement seems at odds with reality, since it suggests a level of organization and capability far lower than what would be necessary for them to accomplish what they do on a daily basis, leading me to think this is a nonsense excuse to hide something.

it might be split across multiple databases on different staff types, though it still should be that hard. 

[yian88]

All you need to know about leftist brain gap...

 

[FakezZ]

5 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

That's actually been done as well  

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9516.html

 

That's too much of a stretch. Having all the factors that can possibly matter can be nearly impossible, but that is not what it takes to reliably isolate the effect of one variable or another (for example, anything that can be done in a lab experiment will only need a bit of randomization, even if you ignore all other determinants).

I don't know what you mean by testing the law of gravitation. You can drop things, and they will fall. 

Now, does his theory hold as he formulated? Certainly not 10/10 times. In fact, we discovered planets thanks to it failing, until we ran out of hidden planets - then relativity had to take over  

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/#406889ef48e7

 

I would love to see an example of such falisification. I mean, of course it can happen, and when it does, it means the explanation was not correct. But that doesn't mean that there aren't results that you can replicate over and over again (like, for example, the wage gap  And still that's just a stylized fact, not a theory - theories only come into place to interpret it. These studies already incorporate all the plausible theories we have so far on what could account for it, and whenever someone has a new good idea, excellent: time to publish  )

 

 

Man, the law of Universal Gravitation is not as simple as "you drop things and they fall" and if you look in the article it says it finally failed. But yes if you test the law on the Earth 10/10 times the result of the fomula is represented by reality. Also the fact that it always works, except for a specific case does not make it wrong. If a business increases the price of a product by 10% and then drops the price by 10%, while there are mathematical models that can estimate the result, in the end nobody really knows what is going to happen to the amount sold. I would be happy to hear something that can actually be replicated over and over in the market with exact precision. I bet you won't find a thing.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

it might be split across multiple databases on different staff types, though it still should be that hard. 

And also likely that there's no single person or division that has access to its entirety. 

 

It will be split across different access rights so no one can access their own or people's information above them. So yeh, it's definitely not a case of a single query on everyone's salary. 

[TOMPPIX]

i think this might be much more complicated than you think it is, because of statistical paradoxes.

[Misanthrope]

They probably want to avoid it cause they know it will have a huge wage gap simply because there's just not enough women graduating from STEM fields for them to fill all their engineering positions and henceforth promotions with enough women to avoid it.

 

Sadly this is the level of discourse we have at this point and they're well aware they'd walk into a minefield with almost no hope of coming out unharmed.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, BluJay614 said:

Cause it doesn't exist

Just because it doesn't exist on average and across a country doesn't mean it can't happen in individual businesses... let's not rush to conclusions before any real investigation is done. The law forbids such practices, doesn't mean people won't break the law at times.

[Sauron]

48 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

They probably want to avoid it cause they know it will have a huge wage gap simply because there's just not enough women graduating from STEM fields for them to fill all their engineering positions and henceforth promotions with enough women to avoid it.

 

Sadly this is the level of discourse we have at this point and they're well aware they'd walk into a minefield with almost no hope of coming out unharmed.

Isn't this more about women and men with the exact same job getting paid differently?

[BuckGup]

8 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

What the fuck is that journalist garbage? Journalists are the ones quoting numbers they don't understand in the first place, and all of the sudden they become the source for this climate-change-like denialism?

Give me actual peer-reviewed research, man. You now, "science!" and all that.

Hello 

https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/gender_research.pdf

it is a reasearch paper written by someone with a PHD. Not saying your dumb but open your eyes for a sec

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, yian88 said:

All you need to know about leftist brain gap...

 

pffff he's just an uncle tom

Spoiler

/s

 

[Centurius]

9 hours ago, FakezZ said:

Lol the wage gap again. Just come up with a single company that could get away with paying women less than men and still hire men. This is not how business works...

Not that I am particularly convinced that a pay gap exists but that argument is about as dumb as a lot of the arguments I've heard from the other side. That scenario presumes all business owners are fully rational actors, that they recognize women are of equal capability and then decide to pay them less because they can get away with it. If a pay gap exists it will be because employers do not acknowledge women to have the same abilities as the men even though they are the same on paper (and in practice).

 

As for whether a pay gap exists, well that's still not been proven or disproven fully under peer-reviewed research using the scientific method and it doesn't change that Google is required under their contracts with the government to provide data on what they pay to their personnel.

[Jito463]

17 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Just because it doesn't exist on average and across a country doesn't mean it can't happen in individual businesses... let's not rush to conclusions before any real investigation is done. The law forbids such practices, doesn't mean people won't break the law at times.

When people commonly mention gender wage gaps, they typically mean as a systemic problem, not specifically in regards to an individual company.  Presumably this is what @BluJay614 was referring to.

[JuNex03]

10 hours ago, BluJay614 said:

Cause it doesn't exist

A fellow Undoomed subscriber?

[Misanthrope]

34 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Isn't this more about women and men with the exact same job getting paid differently?

It should be but if often isn't: Most wage gap statistics never go into that level of detail to determine there's a wage gap they just take X amount of men vs X amount of women and do an average salary figure, regardless of position and such.

 

So by this logic of course Google will probably have a wage gap simply by virtue of having far more men in some engineering areas but if they were to go do per-position data they'd come out ok. But even if they pushed per-position data I suspect most feminist would point out at the overall numbers and call them misogynists. 

 

I could be wrong but most of the time people denouncing a wage gap in favor of women are never reasonable and always just trying to push an agenda by playing fast and loose with the numbers.