Why Google’s excuse doesn’t work

Apparently getting data on gender pay discrepancies costs too much money.

Last Friday, Google officials testified in Federal Court that “it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to hand over salary records that the government requested in [its] discrimination case.”

What does “financially burdensome” mean? Up to 500 hours of labor costs and $100,000. And by “up to” I actually mean…. ONLY.

Google, at a minimum you could have just attempted to find a better excuse than this.

Here’s what Google is saying to us:

1. Even though we’re a company that has made literally billions off of its success through the gathering, analyzing, organizing and implementation of data, we’re somehow unable to use that well-tuned skill set to see if there’s a gender pay gap in our midst.
2. Let’s say they actually could not do #1 above. 500 hours? That’s 10 peoples’ time for one week. For a company that size, this seems manageable. $100K? They spend this amount of money while I grind my coffee beans in the morning. While I ground one coffee bean.

But what it’s really saying to us is that, while many of these companies talk about about equality, it still isn’t being focused on or realized internally the way it needs to be. They aren’t making some of that structural change we talk about around here (see #4 here).

The discussion — the talk — needs to turn into action — the walk. We’re reaching a point at which it simply isn’t acceptable for leading, global companies to not commit the resources necessary to tackle these gaps. Media coverage and event sponsorship isn’t enough — Google has spent well over $100K in marketing dollars on sponsoring women in technology events.

Spending $100K to reassess your internal structure is at least a first step towards enough.

Let’s do better than this.