Google's Equal-Pay Claim for Women Comes With an Asterisk

  • Highest-paid jobs, majority held by men, excluded from report
  • Shareholder calls analysis ‘incomplete,’ presses for more

People take pictures of a Google Inc. office building inside the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Photographer: Michael Short/Bloomberg

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Following a handful of big U.S. companies in tech and finance, Google today said it found no significant difference in what it pays its male and female employees -- with one big caveat.

Alphabet Inc. said that for 89 percent of Google’s more than 70,000 global employees, there was no “statistically significant” pay gap related to gender or race. The other 11 percent, left out of the analysis because they belonged to job groups that were either too small or too imbalanced to meet Google’s standards for “statistical rigor,” included the company’s senior vice presidents and above.