Pay gap closed (conditions may apply)
Following a handful of big US companies in tech and finance, Google this month said it found no significant difference in what it pays its male and female employees — with one big “but”.
Parent Alphabet Inc. said that for 89 per cent of Google’s 70,000-plus global employees, there was no “statistically significant” pay gap related to gender or race. The other 11 per cent — left out of the analysis because they belonged to job groups that were too small or too imbalanced to meet Google’s standards for “statistical rigour” — included the company’s senior vice-presidents and above.
Google’s disclosure follows a proposal by activist shareholder Arjuna Capital, which has been pressing tech and financial companies to disclose, and promise to close, the gaps between the earnings of their male and female employees.
Arjuna managing partner Natasha Lamb said she was “concerned that 11 per cent of Google employees are left out of the analysis.”
A company spokeswoman said: “We’re continually looking for ways to expand the percentage of Googlers included in our pay equity analyses, while maintaining the rigour of our analytics.”
Google’s disclosure is one of the first by a large US company to include its methodology. While most of the companies have said they “adjusted” their numbers for employee seniority, location and job title, Google said it limited its findings to job categories with 30 or more employees with at least five men and at least five women. That excluded all employees with a rank above vice-president, the company said.
Google has spent the past year defending itself against accusations of pay discrimination — illegal in the US.
Analysts have been sceptical of recent, voluntary pay gap disclosures by US tech and financial companies. Several banks said their pay gap hovered around 1 per cent, when adjusted for job title, location, seniority and other factors.
These reported differences are notably small compared with banks in Britain, where the government has mandated that all companies employing 250 or more people report unadjusted average and median pay gap numbers.
Last week, HSBC Holdings reported that, on average, female employees earned 59 per cent less than male employees.