The Department of Labor keeps finding new evidence of “systemic compensation disparities” in their continuing investigation of Google’s workforce gender discrimination practices. Janet Herold, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor (DoL) told the Guardian on Friday that “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.” (Italics mine, because when you have to use the word extreme in an already extremely sexist industry, then you know it’s bad).

Google, for one, disagrees. Yesterday Eileen Naughton, Google’s Vice President of ‘People Operations’ (good Lord), posted a statement from the company on their blog, saying they were “taken aback by this assertion, which came without any supporting data or methodology.”

But Google refused to provide valuable data on employee compensation to the DoL back in September, saying the request was “too broad,” and citing privacy concerns – so the DoL decided to take them to court.

Google also released their own methodology in response to the wage gap allegations. Employee compensation, the company says, is measured by “role, job level, job location as well as current and recent performance ratings.” Then the information undergoes a four-stage, “gender blind” process using an “equity pay model” that compares salaries between genders and corrects for disparities.

In fact, Google feels so confident about this system that they tweeted earlier in the month that the company had “completely closed the gender pay gap globally.” But solving gender inequality in the workplace takes more than just figuring out equal pay, and includes matters of retention (Who is staying? Who is leaving?), promotion (Who is being put in upper management positions?), and visibility (promoting employee’s exposure while avoiding tokenism).

There’s other more nuanced factors that account for workplace discrimination as well. As Gizmodo points out, “Although salary is calculated by analysts who can’t see employee gender, they factor in performance ratings which themselves are subjective and shaped by biases.”

Also not on Google's side: the glaring fact that (even according to their own data) nearly 70 percent of their workforce is, in fact, male. But to their credit, the company has tried to make improvements to gender-based policies before: when they increased paid maternity leave in 2007 from 12 to 18 weeks, they cut the rate at which new mothers quit by half.