Does Google underpay its female employees when compared to their male counterparts? That’s what the Labor Department’s regional solicitor Janet Herold alleges. In fact, the Labor Department is currently suing Google to force the tech giant to hand over data that the company claims would violate its employees’ privacy.

Interestingly, Google’s lead analyst for pay equity and people analytics, Lauren Barbato, recently posted the company’s annual internal employee-wage review and found that a greater percentage of its male employees “received less discretionary funds than women.” As a result of the finding, Google compensated 10,677 employees an extra $9.7 million to make up the pay gap.

This admission and action from Google flies in the face of one of the Left’s favorite debunked talking point, the gender pay gap. Could it also be that Google, which infamously fired engineer James Damore last year for his daring to raise questions over the company’s leftist dogma on gender and diversity, be working to prove their “wokeness” regarding gender pay inequity?

However, as Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw astutely points out, companies are in business to make money and, for companies, “negotiating salaries is a tricky business under any set of circumstances, but if someone isn’t great at such bargaining sessions and are willing to take a lower salary, the company will obviously agree and save money where they can.” Furthermore, “If you replace this competitive system with some sort of fixed pay scale for everyone to avoid ‘inequity’ or a gender/race ‘gap’ (as the government does), you remove all incentive for superior performance. Why work harder and produce more if you’re going to be given the same pay as the person in the next cubicle who is obviously doing the minimum required and just phoning it in? This idea of non-performance based pay equity is a particularly socialist notion.”

This whole situation highlights the clashing of two opposing worldviews when it comes to work and pay. Google, a massive company on the cutting edge of technological innovation, got to where it is today because it hired the best and brightest and compensated them in turn. But now it’s being challenged to maintain that standard — by embracing a socialist work paradigm, which places “equity” as its highest value. As a result, innovation will suffer.