Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-
Employees Who Say It Pays
Women Less Than Men
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHISEPT. 14, 2017
Photo
Googles main campus in Mountain View, Calif. Three female ex-employees
sued the company this week over what they say is systematic discrimination in
how women are paid.CreditChristie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO Three women who worked at Google are suing
the company over its salary practices, accusing the search giant of
discriminating against its female employees by systematically paying
them less than men who do similar jobs.
In the suit, which was filed Tuesday in California Superior Court in
San Francisco, the plaintiffs say Google knew or should have known
about the pay disparity between men and women at the company, but
failed to take action to rectify it.
While Google has been an industry-leading tech innovator, its
treatment of female employees has not entered the 21st century, said
Kelly M. Dermody of the law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann &
Bernstein, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the suit. This case
seeks to ensure fairness for women at Google.
Critics have argued that Google and other powerful technology
companies have not done enough to level the playing field for women,
especially in terms of elevating them to leadership and key
engineering roles.
Google is attracting particular scrutiny over how it treats female
employees after a memo written by a former male software engineer
for the company argued that its efforts to bring more women into
technical roles were unfair and not good for business. Women make
up 31 percent of Googles work force but hold only 20 percent of the
companys higher-paying engineering jobs.
Gina Scigliano, a spokeswoman for Google, said the company was
reviewing the suit, but added that we disagree with the central
allegations. Job levels and promotions at Google, she said, are
determined through a rigorous process that includes checks to ensure
there that no gender bias figured in decisions.
The suit comes after of a contentious fight with the Labor
Department over a routine audit of the Googles pay practices. Google
is subject to Labor Department oversight as a federal contractor that
sells advertising and internet services to the government.
At a hearing this year, a department official said the audit had found
systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much
across the entire work force, although Google has not officially been
accused of any wrongdoing.
Last week, The New York Times published an article showing,
according to data compiled by employees that provided a snapshot of
salary information, that Googles female employees in the United
States were paid less than male employees at most job levels at the
company, and that the pay disparity extended as women rose up the
ranks.
Google said the data painted an incomplete picture of how its workers
are paid, because it did not take into account different roles at the
company, job performance and where the employees are based.
Based on its own January 2017 analysis, Google said that, accounting
for factors like tenure, job role and performance, female employees
earned 99.7 cents to every dollar earned by men.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-
pay-
lawsuit.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FDiscrimination&actio
n=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=str
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Last summer, Ivanka Trump promised that her father would fight for equal pay for
women. Yet six months into Donald Trump's presidency, a groundbreaking equal
pay initiative is in the crosshairs, under assault by Republicans in Congress and the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
For decades, large employers have been required to confidentially report the race
and gender makeup of their workforces within major occupation categories to the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the federal agency responsible for
enforcing laws against discrimination at work. And in 2016, the Obama
administration announced an expansion of that reporting: a new requirement that
large companies start confidentially reporting what they pay their employees by
occupational category, sex, race and ethnicity.
But because of the race and gender wage gaps that persist across occupation and
industry, corporate special interests are desperate to keep pay hidden from
scrutiny. That's why the Chamber of Commerce has asked the Trump
administration to rescind the new equal pay reporting requirement. And it's why
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved an
amendment that would block this initiative to an important bill on a party-line vote
a shameful move against equal pay, transparency and fairness. That bill will soon
come to the House floor for a vote.
ll of this has many of us asking, when exactly will the fight for equal pay that Ivanka
promised begin? To be sure, the president seems an unlikely equal pay champion,
given the wide-ranging assaults on labor and civil rights protections his
administration has launched. Yet, if anything should kick the fight for equal pay
into high gear, it is the startling data on the wages black women are paid: Black
women working full time, year-round are paid only 63 cents for every dollar paid
to white, non-Hispanic men a gap significantly larger than the overall gender
wage gap of 20 cents. As a result, black women will typically have to work 19
months until July 31, Black Women's Equal Pay Day to make as much white,
non-Hispanic men made in the previous 12-month calendar year. That means they
stand to lose more than $800,000 to the race and gender wage gap over the course
of their career.
And no matter how you slice the numbers, inequality persists. Among cashiers and
retail salespeople, black women are paid 53 cents for every dollar paid to white,
non-Hispanic men. Among janitors, cleaners, maids and housekeepers, it's 64
cents. On the other side of the income spectrum, in highly paid occupations jobs
that typically pay about $100,000 annually or more black women, again, make 64
cents on the dollar. In other words, this can't be explained away by credentials or
job choice.
Pay discrimination is a big driver of this gap. Gender and racial stereotypes both
conscious and unconscious infect pay decisions again and again. A sobering
2012 study, for example, found that science professors who were given otherwise
identical applications for a lab manager position proposed an average starting
salary of $30,200 when the applicant was named John, compared to $26,500 when
the applicant was named Jennifer. Another recent study found that while black job-
seekers negotiated at the same rate as white job-seekers, they were perceived to
be "pushier," which resulted in lower starting salaries. The intersection of these
stereotypes hits black women hard.
None of this should come as a surprise to the many black women who answered
activist Brittany Packnet's call to share stories of everyday discrimination under
the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag. The hashtag went viral earlier this year as
black women made visible the large and small ways they are undermined at work,
ultimately translating into lower pay and fewer opportunities.
The subtle and not so subtle drivers of pay discrimination persist because they are
so difficult to ferret out. If you don't know you are being paid less than the new guy
with less experience who works across the hall, you can't challenge it. But pay is
typically cloaked in secrecy, and so unjustified race and gender pay disparities
grow unchecked in many workplaces.
That is why the new, expanded report Republicans aim to block is so critical. It will
encourage companies to not only identify and correct pay disparities, but also
prevent them in the first place by proactively evaluating their pay practices. It will
allow the EEOC to see which employers have race and gender pay gaps that differ
significantly from the pay patterns of their industry peers, allowing it to scrutinize
those employers more closely. Equally important, reporting pay data will also
ensure that employers are measuring their own race and gender wage gaps an
important step along the path for employers seeking to prevent and address
unjustified pay disparities.
The fate of this critical equal pay initiative hangs in the balance, and the next few
weeks will likely be decisive. If it is blocked, it will send a message to employers
that it is fine to hide pay discrimination under the rug, harming women and people
of color across the country. And it will set black women at work even further back.
The Trump administration has so far been silent on where it stands on the equal
pay report initiative. This Black Women's Equal Pay Day, the effort deserves a
champion in the White House.
Tags: wages, discrimination, race, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump
