Four women who used to work for Google have won class-action status for their gender equity lawsuit against the search engine company, permitting them to address about 10,800 women, Bloomberg reports.
The lawsuit charges that Google pays men more than women for a similar work, disregarding California’s Equal Pay Act, and that Google paid its female employees almost $17,000 less each year than male counterparts in similar jobs. The women recorded the suit in 2017, guaranteeing they were placed into lower career tracks than their male associates?supposed “job ladders” that brought about them accepting lower rewards and pay rates. The women have since left Google.
“This is a huge day for women at Google and in the technology sector, and we are so pleased with our daring clients for driving the way,” Kelly Dermody, an attorney addressing the women, wrote in an email to Bloomberg. “This order shows that it is important that organizations focus on paying women equitably over going through cash battling them in litigation.” The plaintiffs weren’t the only ones blaming Google for methodicallly underpaying female employees in 2017; the US Department of Labor likewise sued Google that year for retaining compensation information, and closed three months after the fact that Google was liable for “systemic compensation disparities against women basically across the whole workforce.” Google consented to pay $2.5 million to employees and job applicants recently over supposed pay and recruiting discrimination.
A Google spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the company “unequivocally has faith in the equity” of its policies and practices. The spokesperson didn’t straightforwardly address the lawsuit’s class action status, however said the company has played out a “rigorous pay equity analysis” every year for as long as eight years. “In the event that we discover any distinctions in proposed pay, including among men and women, we make up adjustments to eliminate them before new compensation becomes real,” the spokesperson added, saying that last year alone Google made “up adjustments” for 2,352 employees across the company, for a sum of $4.4 million. Google had more than 135,000 employees as of December, and pulled in $17 billion in profit last quarter alone.