Women should be paid more because they are more dissatisfied

Heh. I saw the headline below in a number of spots and just assumed it was some parody account and didn't bother to click through. But apparently it is indeed the real deal.

From Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity by Daisuke Wakabayashi. Alternative headline - Company Which Discriminates Against Men Discovers It Also Pays Them Less.

From the article.

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.

Having run businesses in several countries, I can testify to two things - 1) One of your greatest strategic strengths is the quality of your business culture manifested through employees and 2) Managing your human processes is just about the most time consuming and difficult thing to do well.

People are wonderfully and distressingly variant. One process size does not fit all. HR departments almost always start out as compliance organizations so transforming them into organizations focused on innovation and growth is challenging. And processes only cover the 60-70-80% of human activities that are reasonably predictable. There is that huge swarth where goals and means and knowledge and norms and practices between individuals are discovered to be different than expected, or misunderstood, or in conflict.

And meshing law and civil norms and the conflicts of exceptional circumstances is a nightmare. There are more opportunities for philosophical debate and reflection in managing a business than in a PhD in philosophy. Aligning what is right and good for individuals, for the organization, for the customers, for the community, for the nation and for the world is an impossible act as you scale to hundreds and thousands of employees in different business in different countries.

All you can do is your best based on strong but flexible processes, a willingness to selectively break processes to ensure fairness, and respect for everyone.

Google is being assailed by activists more interested in their personal goals or breaking Google or their totalitarian ideology. Google is ever on the defense because there are always other issues to be explored.

In this instance, they have a mechanism for ensuring that everyone is being paid the same for the same work. Great. But then they discover that for whatever reason, they have been systemically underpaying their male employees. You do the right thing and bring them up to market, but now you are being lambasted by the ideologues for whom it is an indisputable truism that only women can be victims.

And there are always nuances. Having ensured that all employees are paid equally within grade, you still have the issue of whether people are properly allocated to the correct grade.

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.

The following is probably the most astounding paragraph in the article. It is also a rare clarity into the mind of exploitive ideologists and evidence that they are fighting for power and money, not for principle.

Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity. That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.

Paying everyone the same for the same work is a flawed and incomplete sense of equality? Really? Joelle Emerson seems to be arguing that companies should be paying women more for the same work because women feel like they have it harder in life. That's how I am reading it. Perhaps uncharitably.

And what is this Paradigm?

Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity.

Can't help but translate that into real world speak.

Paradigm, a niche consulting firm which exploits politics and ideology to coerce companies into buying a diversity indulgence from a privileged one percenter.

Joelle Emerson, Paradigm's CEO - What are the structural hurdles she faces and of which she speaks. One percenter by education (Standford sociology and polisci and Stanford JD), one percenter by social status (young attractive white woman), and one percenter by career (multiple internships, fellowships, summer associate position with white-shoe firm, clerkships, board positions, etc. - all products of connections and family wealth). And the entirety of her brief career spent on riding the wave of victimhood and gender ideology.

I don't think such people can possibly conceive of how the non-one percenters and real-world pragmatists view such cloistered self-dealing, presumption and self-regard.

One might factually make the counter claim based on all of the above: American born white men at Google are demographically woefully underrepresented (owing to foreign hires primarily from Asia); they faced persistent discrimination in their educations where women are a strong majority in universities catered to by administrations offering multiple women-only programs and stripping men of all their due process rights; they face firing by Google if they dare to argue evidence over ideology; and to top it all off, they are underpaid compared to their female peers.

Factually accurate but of course also misleading. Humans are far more complicated than can be handled by simplistic hate-based ideological systems and by behemoth organizations trying to comply with the law, compete in the market-place, satisfy customers and address the often unrealistic needs and desires of all their employees.

Useful for the NYT to report real news that contradicts their ideology but far better if this were the norm rather than the surprising exception.