NICOLE KOBIE
If Google really wants to recruit more women, it needs to prove it pays fairly
Equal pay for women is gonna cost you, Google.
The tech industry has a problem with women, and it’s going to cost more than $4.50 per lady to fix it.
Google, it would seem, isn’t keen to pay that much. The tech giant is under investigation by the US Department of Labor, which is demanding salary details of employees stretching back years to uncover whether there’s a gender pay gap at the company. Google has repeatedly claimed that its own internal reports prove there isn’t a salary differential, but the government investigators want more data.
Among other arguments, Google has said that digging up such additional figures would cost $100,000, a sum it’s unwilling to pay. As has been pointed out, it’s laughable that Google can’t easily and cheaply crunch its own employment figures, as hoovering up data and understanding what it means is its day job. But even if such data analysis is too difficult for the biggest data analytics firm that’s ever existed, the cost shouldn’t be a problem. As the good folks at The Register have pointed out, it works out to just 113 seconds worth of revenue for the company.
Based on Google’s employment figures from its last annual report and its diversity stats, it had at the end of last year 22,336 women in its employ, so the bill works out to just under $4.50 each.
Women shouldn’t be losing cash because wealthy corporate giants refuse to shell out
such pittances. If indeed there is a pay gap at Google, be assured it’ll be wider than a couple of quid per lady. Even as a lump sum, that $100,000 is small beans versus the pay differential women face. According to research from recruitment firm Robert Half, the average woman in the UK will lose out by over £300,000 each over their lifetime thanks to the gender pay gap.
And yet $4.50 a head is too much for Google to stump up.
If Google is paying fairly, shelling out $100,000 to prove it unequivocally may seem unfair. But the company should see it as an investment in recruitment. Would you rather work at a firm that’s willing to spend its own cash to ensure equality, or one that doesn’t think you’re worth less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee?
To be fair, Google’s unwillingness to pay likely has more to do with legal manoeuvring than an actual financial concern. And to give the company some credit, it’s long been willing to invest in diversity, pledging $150 million in 2015 to improve its hiring, and this year revealed a mentorship and scholarship programme at Howard University, a traditionally black college in the US.
Admirable as that may be, the gender divide in tech is beyond Google’s direct control. There’s only so much one company can do to shift societal expectations and encourage more people to take the right courses to become coders. But while that may be out of Google’s hands, the pay gap among its own employees is something it can solve.
Plus, it’s lunacy to chuck money at encouraging young women to study the requisite subjects as teenagers and mentoring them through college, only to pay them less than their male colleagues when they’re finally hired.
Google can do better. It’s already ahead of the pack in many ways – it’s mentoring black female students, while Uber’s CEO is taking over the breast-feeding room for his own personal meditation room and Apple’s massive new HQ manages multiple new gyms but no child care.
But it’d be far better for Google to welcome government auditors into its HR department, accept any criticism (if there is any), and fix the problem. It’s easy to see why a company would fear the negative headlines but I’d rather see a company genuinely working towards closing the pay gap than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Equality takes effort and it costs money – and it’ll cost Google one way or another. Better $4.50 now than losing out on top female coders down the line.