During a wide-ranging compensation study that examined the pay of some 10,000 employees, Google's head of payment analytics uncovered a disturbing trend. Members of one particular gender were being underpaid at an alarming rate.

And we're not talking about the company's female employees. We're talking about the men.

Lauren Barbato, the company's lead analyst for equity pay, explained in a blog post published Tuesday that the company's pay algorithm appeared to systematically.

Compensation should be based on what you do, not who you are. Every year, each employee’s compensation is modeled algorithmically, based on work-related inputs like the market rate for their job, their location, level and performance rating. If managers then want to apply discretion to adjust an employee’s modeled compensation, they must provide a clear rationale. To make sure that the modeled amounts, and any changes made by managers, are equitable across gender and racial lines, we conduct an annual pay equity analysis that covers all job groups that meet minimum n-count thresholds for statistical analysis. If we find any statistically significant discrepancies in any job groups, we make upwards adjustments across the group to eliminate the discrepancy. [...] There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017. First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women.

Yes, you read that right. Google, the tech behemoth which is presently facing lawsuits filed by at least four former female employees who allege they were underpaid compared with male colleagues in similar positions, conducted a transparent, comprehensive analysis of compensation, and found that male employees were underpaid at a much higher rate than female employees. And why? Because managers at the company frequently intervened to secure more 'discretionary' compensation for their female engineers.

That would appear to contradict the crux of a lawsuit filed by Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company. Google had hired her in 2010 as a Level 3 employee, a category for engineers who are recent college graduates, despite her having four years of experience.

Within a few weeks, a male engineer who had also graduated from college four years earlier was hired on to Ellis’s team as a Level 4 employee, with higher pay and better advancement opportunities. Of course, the notion that this employee might simply be a better engineer - or might have had more valuable experience during his time in the work force - isn't discussed.

For what its worth, critics of the Google survey quoted in - where else? - the New York Times argued that the study is incomplete because it ignores "the structural hurdles" women face - i.e. whether they are assigned to the appropriate tier for their level of experience and skill. Of course, this is a much harder metric to measure.

But at the very least, the Google study appears to categorically refute one of the central arguments of feminists who constantly bemoan the "wage gap". At Google, men are more frequently underpaid for doing the same job as a female engineer.