Google is today taking to its official blog to school the U.S government about its compensation practices, which are completely gender blind. Instead, the tech giant revealed that its pay calculation methods are scientific and robust. It has again denied the claims brought forth by the U.S labor department and said that the company’s practices are opposed to the allegations of systematically pay inequities against female employees.
In the blog post, Google mentions that it was quite stunned to hear about the irregularities in its pay methodology when it had relayed the exciting news that it had managed to close the pay gap globally just days ago. In their annual compensation analysis, the tech giant had mentioned that it provides an equal compensation across gender and races in the U.S. And the Department of Labor slammed a completely opposite allegation on the company — female staff members being paid less than men.
Speaking on the same, Eileen Naughton, Google vice president for People Operations said:
We were quite surprised when a representative of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs at the U.S. Department of Labor (OFCCP) accused us of not compensating women fairly. We were taken aback by this assertion, which came without any supporting data or methodology.
Thus, Google is furthering the transparency for its organization and has now released the process followed by them to determine the compensation of its staff members. It has not released the financial details for any individual, that’d be insensitive of them, but have tried to reassure the Labor Department that being a man/woman doesn’t signify anything in their pay calculation — because it isn’t considered while determining the same.
In the blog post, Naughton says that the compensation for employees at Google consists of base salary, bonus, and equity. These are calculated on the basis of role, job level, job location, as well as current and recent performance ratings. She further adds that these calculations are extremely unbiased and gender data isn’t made available to analysts to calculate the suggested amounts. Gender and race are not metric that aren’t fed into the company’s pay equity model. The whole calculation process has been broken down into a four-step process, which is defined as under:
Talking about its practices, Naughton continues to add,
Our analysis gives us confidence that there is no gender pay gap at Google. In fact, we recently expanded the analysis to cover race in the US.
Our pay equity model then looks at employees in the same job categories, and analyzes their compensation to confirm that the adjusted amount shows no statistically significant differences between men’s and women’s compensation.
This blog post comes as an explanation for the allegations which have been slapped onto Google by the U.S Department of Labor. It all started back in January of this very year, so the wounds are relatively new. The Labor Department had then sued Google to gain access to all of its employee compensation data as part of a routine evaluation – because Google is a federal contractor. The ones employed by the government need to comply with its rules and regulations, else what good the authorities would be.
The tech giant responded saying that it had provided authorities access to thousands of documents but had retained some to prevent disclosure of private employee information. It further added that all information relevant to the investigation had been provided but the Labor Department hit back at the company with the gender pay discrimination charge a couple days ago. In addition to denying the claims back then, Google has made its compensation calculation method public — so it’s full disclosure from the tech giant.
However, the difference in payment packages on the basis of gender, caste, and race is one of the primary problems which plague the Silicon Valley. A recent report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that women’s weekly earnings in California in 2015 averaged 15 percent below male employees. The Silicon Valley gender pay gap equates to a $7,000 annual loss for women and marks the widest pay gap since 2002. And this trend is seen is mostly in technology jobs.
