Google has begun paying gay staff in the US on average £650 per annum more than straight employees in order to compensate for the extra taxes they have to fork out.
The wage hike, which will be backdated to 1 January this year, is to make up for the fact that when US organisations offer health insurance benefits for employees’ partners, it is taxable for same sex couples but not for heterosexual married ones. As a result, the search engine giant is now making up the difference. It is unclear whether the move also covers unmarried heterosexual couples who co-habit, however.
Google has also given gay couples the same rights as heterosexual ones to take time off work for family or medical reasons. It will likewise pay infertility benefits to homosexual staff and include their partners in its compassionate leave policy.
The move came after the vendor worked with carriers to redefine the concept of ‘infertility’. Under Google’s terms and conditions, the term now means "the inability to conceive a child with no stipulations on trying for one year", according to a blog by Cynthia Yeung, a member of the firm’s strategic partner development team.
Google employs 20,600 staff, some 700 of whom are understood to belong to an internal gay group, who call themselves ‘Gayglers’, but the overall cost of implementing the measures is unknown. They only apply to the company’s US workforce.
Vice president for people operations Laszlo Bock told the Daily Mail that the firm decided to act when the disparity was pointed out by a staff member. "We said: ‘You’re right. That doesn’t seem fair,’" he said.
