Now what?
This really is a res ipsa loquitur classic. Microsoft is literally saying, “We don’t have to obey the law, and besides, this is good discrimination.” Why isn’t the Justice Department bearing down on the company already? You know why.
Here is how the company introduces its great success at paying white men less than women and minorities…
Nice! Corporations like Microsoft—there are others similarly discriminating against citizens for being white and/or male—are forcing the upcoming election to become a referendum on anti-white, anti-male, anti-merit, discriminatory policies in all sectors. That’s dangerous and divisive, but apparently the arrogant Left is convinced its efforts to institutionalize bigotry is safe because critics are terrified that they will be called racist and sexist, or accused of opposing “democracy.” This isn’t democracy, and if the American public, including white males, are too cowed and intellectually crippled by woke indoctrination that they won’t fight for their legitimate human rights, they deserve to be the second class citizens these unethical measures are determined to make them.
I assume some Microsoft lawyers approved the policy and this description of it. They should be fired and sent back to law school. (Not Georgetown, however.)
The Libs of TikTok found this indefensible garbage on the Microsoft website. I wish now I hadn’t thrown off the site some of the knee-jerk progressive apologists who I bet would try to find a rationalization or a logical fallacy to try to defend it anyway. It would be fun to see how dishonest and risible their efforts would be.
Ethics Alarms 
A difference of less than 1% doesn’t seem like much to crow about on the one hand, or to get twitterpated about on the other. Is there evidence that this is indeed a policy decision per se, or are other factors (supervisor’s evaluation of work quality, local cost of living, whatever) part of the process?
I think you’ve got the wrong takeaway here. What they said isn’t “policy”. They aren’t setting compensation using this as a formula, this is the analysis of pay compensation after the fact.
The goal in such analysis is to find pay between groups to be as close to 1:1 as possible, or 1.000000 for every dollar of a different group. The pendulum has swung and white employees are now ‘underpaid’, but not by much. It’s not like the lie about women’s pay of 70 cents to the dollar where people are underpaid by orders of magnitude.
Had Microsoft found that Black US employees of similar position and tenure earned $0.993 for every $1 of a white counterpart, we’d all call that a “nothing burger”. In fact, we’d look at it as a statistical tie and that equality and equity had been achieved.
Even given the above, the data they’re analyzing across thousands of employees, you still have winners and losers. Individuals that buck the trend and others that are setting the curve.
So rather than roast Microsoft for this report, congratulate them on conducting the analysis and ask them to continue to do so in future years taking into consideration changing compensation and employment patterns.
But Tim, they are taking credit for the fact that white and male employees are “underpaid.” That means they were underpaid because they are white, by the now universal “disparate impact” standards. It doesn’t matter by how much.
And, obviously, if pay is by merit, the entire emphasis is pointless. By their own stated standards of “equity,” pay is not determined by merit. No? Even keeping the statistics by race and gender is damning.
But they aren’t taking credit. They’re reporting results of statistical analysis. Conducting this statistical analysis is not “damning”, it’s expected from every publicly traded Fortune 1000 company. This analysis is done as part of an ESG public disclosure and has appropriate caveats that for people in a similar location, in a similar job, with similar tenure, the pay disparity is less than a penny. That still doesn’t mean that every white person makes less than their counterpart or that every non-white makes more than their counterpart because this is data aggregation (manipulated data at that) across hundreds / thousands of people and jobs. Doesn’t mean the result wasn’t skewed by one lucky and well compensated employee.
You don’t find the rhetoric about “equity” as a core value virtue-signaling? Job title, tenure and level are the criteria mentioned. Nothing about skill, achievement or character, which would normally be at the top of the list.
re: Skill, Achievement, Character – those are one time attributes. e.g. “Everyone who was rated ‘over-achieved’ received a 32% annual bonus.”
This is a skillful analysis done. They didn’t just look at the full operation and say “Hey, we have 90% of our black population in Sr Analyst roles and 90% of our SVPs are white making big bucks. So comparing those two, we’ve found that on average, Black MicroSoft employees make $74k per year and White MS employees make $120k per year. This tells us that Black employees make $0.6166 per every $1 made by White employees.”
That would have been deceptive. Instead, they went looking for bonafide disparities and found a statistical tie. The shit employees were paid less, the over achievers were paid more and when all the dust settled, there was no discernable difference between the races because they are properly compensating everyone.
All this really tells the world is that if the white employees want to negotiate for higher compensation, there’s now probably an opportunity for that to happen.
I used to work at Microsoft. There are internal Enterprise Resource Groups (essentially groups of employees with a shared interest) for every race and ethnicity, except one. As my tenure over there was ending, these groups instead of behaving as the cultural ambassadors they were supposed to be started acting as miniature unsanctioned unions representing their members. I’m 99% certain this report was written to appease one specific ERG. Whether there is a discriminatory policy in practice, I can’t tell, but since Nadella took over it’s hard to distinguish between incompetence and malice.