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Facebook parent Meta pays women less than men in U.K. and Ireland

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Facebook parent Meta pays women less than men in U.K. and Ireland

Like many businesses, Meta jumped on the International Women’s Day bandwagon yesterday.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp posted advice for the “extraordinary women” in its community on LinkedIn.

But perhaps, the only advice the tech giant should be posting is how the females in its firm can earn as much as their male counterparts. 

Because the woman working at Meta, in the U.K. or Ireland, are still being paid significantly less than men at the tech giant. 

According to Meta’s most recent gender pay gap report for its U.K. and Ireland arm, its female workers are paid less than their male colleagues—whether they’re hourly workers or on a salary.

The company also hands women smaller bonuses and men make up the majority of high-paid workers in the U.K. and Ireland business that has headquarters in London and Dublin. 

Pay gap report paints a decline in gender equality

For every £1 a male employee earns at Meta U.K., women earn 92p when looking at median hourly pay. 

The average bonus going to women at Meta is also 34.8% less than bonuses paid to men, and women hold less than a third of the highest-paid roles.

Women were paid 2.1% less than the average man in 2021-2022, and the trend seems to be going in the wrong direction, as the data points to a decline in gender equality at the firm.

In 2018, when Meta published its first report on gender equality, women were paid on average 0.9% less than men.

The gap report from Meta’s Ireland business makes for an even more grim reading.

The report, which was quietly released in December as part of a new law in the country that went into effect last year, revealed that women working across Meta in Ireland were paid 15.7% less on average than men in 2022. 

The difference in bonus pay in the country is even starker, with the average bonus for women being 43.3% lower than those that men were awarded.

What Meta says about its gender equality gap

Meta blamed “unequal representation” for their pay gap.

“We have more men than women working at Meta in technical roles, particularly senior technical roles,” the company said in a statement:

It further explained that the pay for those with these “skills” are higher than for “non-technical roles” and that “the pool of this talent, particularly for more senior positions, continues to be predominantly male.”

“This is a challenge faced by all companies in Tech and by many companies in other industries. We recognize that this is a journey, one we are fully committed to and believe the actions we are taking now are, and will continue to have impact on improving the diversity of our workforce,” Meta added. 

While most of the company’s employees are in the U.S., which does not require pay gap disclosures from companies, Meta has about 3,000 workers in Ireland and about 5,000 in the U.K., making up roughly 10% of its current global workforce.

In the report, Meta also shared its ambitions for half of its global workforce to be made up of women and underrepresented minorities. But the company’s diversity reporting shows signs of stagnation. 

As of last year, women make up 37% of the workforce, up just 1% since 2018 when Meta began sharing its diversity report.

The social media company said that it’s addressing this representation issue through hiring, including its Diverse Slate Approach, and by reviewing and assessing its Attract strategy.

“Last year we established an External Partnership model comprising three flagship partnerships: ColourinTech, Everywoman and BYP (Black Young Professionals),” Meta commented.

“All these partnerships result in a steady increase in the hiring rates of underrepresented candidates, and we have seen increases to female representation at Meta, including in technical roles and in leadership roles.”

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Individual + Team Stats: Hornets vs. Timberwolves

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CHARLOTTE HORNETS MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us on X: Facebook – All Hornets X – …

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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

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What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem


It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description. 

But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.  

Consider:

The forgotten novel

Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.

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Snow Crash.

You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change: 

In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.

Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.  

Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users. 

But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.

Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.

Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Meta Quest 3 comes out on October 10 for $500.
Meta Quest 3.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse. 

Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.

Duct-taped to yet another buzzword

Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.

But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.

But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.  

Roblox leads the rise of user-generated content.
Roblox.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.  

Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For 

GamesBeat’s creed when covering the game industry is “where passion meets business.” What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you — not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

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Social media blocks are “a suppression of an essential avenue for transparency”

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In this photo illustration the word censored is seen displayed on a smartphone with the logos of social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube in the background.

Once praised as the defining feature of the internet, the ability to connect with physically distant people is something that governments have recently been seemingly intent on restricting. Authorities have been increasingly pulling the plug, putting over 4 billion people in the shadows in the first half of 2023 alone

Social media platforms are often the first means of communication to be restricted. Surfshark, one of the most popular VPN services, counted at least 50 countries guilty of having curbed these websites and apps during periods of political turmoil such as protests, elections, or military activity.

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