Google Claims It Paid $270K To Reduce Pay Gap Among Staff

In a bid to fill pay gap among its employees, Google conducted a research to analyze pay discrepancies without any specific reason. The company found that 228 employees -- both men and women -- were underpaid across six departments. Then it fixed the gap by compensating each one of the employees. The amount came up to $270,000 before finalizing compensation planning and paying any of the 228 employees.

Men and women from several countries, including the US, were a part of this pay gap pool. Black and latinx also comprised the group of people with pay gap.

To find out the pay gap, Google surveyed at least 30 people working on the same job and five people from every different demographic that it recognizes through race and gender.

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“It allowed us to include 89 per cent of Googlers (63,153) from entry through executive levels. We did not find statistically significant pay differences for 62,925 Googlers, but did for 228 Googlers across six job groups,” a Google official wrote in a blog.

“We will continue to focus on fairness in all of our people processes, and want Google to be a great place for everyone to work.”

Earlier this year, a lawsuit was filed against Google in context of revised gender-pay class-action. It accused Google of gender pay disparity saying that the company underpaid women in comparison with their male counterparts.

The lawsuit included a fourth complainant—a teacher at Google’s Children Center in Palo Alto for four years, Heidi Lamar. The court dismissed the original lawsuit as the plaintiffs could not define the class of affected workers too broadly. The revised lawsuit focuses on those who hold engineer, manager, sales or early childhood education positions.

In January 2017, the Department of Labour also scrutinized Google’s pay practices and filed a lawsuit alleging systemic pay inequalities in the giant company. However Google denied this claim.

In June, an administrative law judge sided with Google, ruling that it did not need to hand over all of the data the DoL requested.

After analyzing the pay disparity among its employees and compensating them for it, Google said, “We will continue to focus on fairness in all of our people processes, and want Google to be a great place for everyone to work.”

Picture credit- The Verge

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