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The gender pay gap has been a hot topic recently, the basis of restaurant promotions, actor salary negotiations, and Jimmy Kimmel bits. But it’s also a tough legal question, and Google’s current legal problems illustrate how even well-meaning companies can miss the larger picture.
Google is currently sparring with the Department of Labor over how much it pays women. The government argues that Google underpays women across the board, creating a systemic problem in the company. Google argues that’s impossible, because it automatically analyzes how it pays people and if it finds a pay discrepancy between demographics, it corrects pay accordingly. So one side has to be full of it, right?
Business Insider used Glassdoor data to get a representative sample of Google employees and their salaries and found that both Google and the Department of Labor have a case. Employees with the same job and same level of experience get paid the same, it’s true. But the analysis also found that women were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs, creating an overall wage gap of 16% in the sample.
In other words, Google’s problem is what HR departments call “occupational segregation.” Depending on who you ask, it accounts for about half the overall wage gap in America, so while both the government and Google may be right, in the long term, Google and the rest of the economy has a much larger problem to fix.
(via Business Insider)