Business

A Google Employee Spreadsheet Shows Pay Disparities Between Men & Women

For the second time in three years, Google is finding itself in the news over an employee-generated spreadsheet. According to The New York Times, a spreadsheet the newspaper obtained shows that male employees at the company receive higher salaries and bonuses than women at nearly every level. Two years ago, Erica Baker, a former Google employee, posted a series of tweets detailing her creation of a transparent, salary-sharing spreadsheet at the company. Baker said this spreadsheet, which showed a gender gap among peer bonuses, was less than welcomed by the higher-ups at the company. The New York Times reports the spreadsheet they saw is the same one initially started by Baker, with up-to-date 2017 base salaries and bonuses. These figures appear to show women earning less than their male counterparts in five out of six pay levels at the company. It's important to note that the spreadsheet only contains information from 1,200 United States-based Google employees, so it is far from representative of the whole. While the Times' report isn't conclusive due to the small size of the data, scrutiny over pay gaps at Google is unlikely to go away anytime soon. The company will have a lot of convincing to do beyond simply saying it's not true.