Tech
Three female Google staff file suit over sexual discrimination
Three women who work for Google have filed a lawsuit alleging the company discriminates against female employees “by systematically paying them lower compensation.”
The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court and seeks class-action status, says Google has violated the California Equal Pay Act and other sections of the state labor code.
Much of the allegations mirror claims made earlier this year by the US Department of Labor, which has an ongoing litigation against Google over alleged gender pay disparities. A statistical regression analysis performed by the government found “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.” Google has disputed those claims.
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The lawsuit alleges that Google “has channeled and segregated” women into career paths and “job ladders” that have lower compensation, compared with men with equal or lesser qualifications.
There are three named plaintiffs in the case. The first is Kelly Ellis, who was hired by Google in 2010 as a front-end software engineer on the Google Photos team.
Although Ellis had four years of experience in software engineering, she was placed into Level 3 on her compensation “ladder,” a level that is typically assigned to new college graduates, according to the complaint.
“There is a false and gendered perception at Google that backend engineering is more technically rigorous, and therefore more prestigious, than frontend software engineering,” the complaint states. On Ellis’ teams, “almost all backend software engineers were men… Almost all female software engineers, however, were frontend engineers.”
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