After the government decided to sue Google over claims of the company discriminating in pay against its female employees, another group of former employees have decided to sue Google for equal pay discrimination.
BBC is reporting that three former Google employees, including a former software engineer, are suing Google for discrimination. One of the claimants, feminist engineer Kelly Ellis, took to Twitter to explain that she hopes this transcends the topic of pay discrimination at Google and affects all tech companies.
My hopes for the Google suit: to force not only Google, but other companies to change their practices and compensate EVERYONE fairly.
— Kelly Ellis (@justkelly_ok) September 14, 2017
When it comes to #equalpay, I’m sick and tired of the denial from Google that anything is wrong. That’s not how you fix it. Time for action.
— Kelly Ellis (@justkelly_ok) September 14, 2017
The suit alleges that women are paid less, treated worse, and have the proverbial glass ceiling in the way, preventing them from being promoted in equal measure to men.
The women allege that they were passed over for promotion and offered less in wages compared to their male counterparts, even when they held similar positions in engineering. The women claim it’s because of “sexist culture” that’s pervasive at Google.
According to the New York Times, a spreadsheet document about wage practices at the company revealed that on the lower levels that men – in the same positions as women – are paid nearly 15% more.
The spreadsheet data was taken from a sample of 1,200 employees working at Google. Following on the investigation by the United States Labor Department, the three former female employees decided to sue the tech giant.
This is a rather ironic turn of events given that Google just recently fired James Damore, another software engineer, for having penned a memo to Google’s hire-ups about treating employees like individuals and not forcing women into roles that they may not feel comfortable pursuing or are properly acclimated for.
Damore’s memo offered some tips about how Google could correct course, but the media storm over the memo ended up costing Damore his job at the company, which was even more ironic given that Damore claimed in the memo that people who held political views not entirely aligned with Google’s Leftist agenda were fair game for losing their jobs.
According to Vanity Fair, Damore has already lawyered up and is suing Google as well. The company did not come out of the situation looking well at all. It would also be a strange twist of fate if the company managed to lose a lawsuit involving gender discrimination after firing James Damore on the grounds of breaching their employee code of conduct for which they felt he discriminated against their female employees.
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