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.
Last week, The New York Times published an article showing, according to data compiled by employees that provided a snapshot of salary information, that Google’s 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.
In the suit, Kelly Ellis, a former Google software engineer and one of the three plaintiffs, says that when the company hired her in 2010, she was brought in as a Level 3 employee — a term for entry-level software engineers who are new college graduates — despite having four years of work .
A second plaintiff, Holly Pease, who worked at Google for 11 years and left in 2016, says in the suit that she was denied opportunities to gain status as a “technical” employee. Such employees earn more than nontechnical employees. She did not gain that status, despite having more than 10 years of experience as a network engineer and managing a Google team made up mostly of technical staff members.
Google said it had already handed over 1.7 million data points and 329,000 documents as part of the inquiry and that the Labor Department was overreaching in its requests for more information. An administrative law judge ruled in July that Google had to hand over some data, although not as much as the Labor Department sought.
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.
Last week, The New York Times published an article showing, according to data compiled by employees that provided a snapshot of salary information, that Google’s 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.
In the suit, Kelly Ellis, a former Google software engineer and one of the three plaintiffs, says that when the company hired her in 2010, she was brought in as a Level 3 employee — a term for entry-level software engineers who are new college graduates — despite having four years of work .
A second plaintiff, Holly Pease, who worked at Google for 11 years and left in 2016, says in the suit that she was denied opportunities to gain status as a “technical” employee. Such employees earn more than nontechnical employees. She did not gain that status, despite having more than 10 years of experience as a network engineer and managing a Google team made up mostly of technical staff members.
Google said it had already handed over 1.7 million data points and 329,000 documents as part of the inquiry and that the Labor Department was overreaching in its requests for more information. An administrative law judge ruled in July that Google had to hand over some data, although not as much as the Labor Department sought.