Class action could increase pressure on corporation following report of payout for exec accused of sexual misconduct

A group of women who sued Google for pay discrimination are advancing a class-action lawsuit in California that could affect more than 8,000 current and former employees, the plaintiffs’ lawyer said.

Jim Finberg, a civil rights attorney for the women behind the high-profile gender pay gap litigation, told the Guardian on Thursday that the Silicon Valley corporation has confirmed that the proposed class action would cover roughly 8,300 women who have worked for Google in California.

The case is moving forward with a San Francisco hearing on Friday, one day after the New York Times published a major investigation saying Google paid a $90m severance package to an executive while concealing details of a sexual misconduct allegation against him.

The class-action complaint could add to the pressure on the corporation, which has faced growing scrutiny over the last year surrounding public allegations of gender and racial discrimination and sexual misconduct.

Google gave top executive $90m payoff but kept sexual misconduct claim quiet – report Read more

The women affected by the pay discrimination case worked in a variety of positions since September of 2013, including product management, product sales, technical operations, software engineering, research and technical writing.

“If the class is certified in this case and we prevail, it will change the way that Google does business, and because Google is a market leader, hopefully it will improve gender equality in Silicon Valley and the tech industry,” Finberg said in an interview.

The class action followed a major inquiry by the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said last year that its audit of Google revealed “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce”. The allegation came after Google, a federal contractor subject to equal opportunity laws, refused to hand over certain records to the DoL. A judge ultimately ordered Google to disclose certain salary documents to labor investigators.

The civil complaint, filed a year ago, alleged that Google was paying women less than men doing similar work while also denying promotions and career opportunities to qualified women who were “segregated” into lower-paying jobs. The first version of the suit covered all women employed by the company in California over four years, but the company fought the suit and data requests of the plaintiffs, and a judge dismissed the initial case as overly broad.

The amended complaint now moving forward covers a more narrow group, though it could still have widespread implications given that the corporation employs 23,000 people at its Mountain View headquarters. The named plaintiffs in the lawsuit include a former engineer, manager and sales worker. Heidi Lamar, who taught employees’ children at the company’s childcare center, also joined the case and shared her story with the Guardian earlier this year.

Google has repeatedly argued that it has a system in place to ensure that women are paid equally and that it is confident there is no gender pay gap at the company.

Finberg said the plaintiffs are in the process of obtaining documents, data and deposition testimony from Google.

This week’s scandal could add fuel to the class-action case. The New York Times reported that Google investigated a female employee’s allegations that Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software, had forced her to perform oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. The company allegedly found the allegations to be credible, and Larry Page, former CEO, asked Rubin to resign – but then continued to pay him installments of $2m a month for four years, according to the story.

Last year, a senior artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Google was also accused of sexual harassment amid a #MeToo reckoning in the male-dominated field of statistics, data science and machine learning. A separate lawsuit earlier this year accused Google of having a “bro-culture” that enabled repeated sexual harassment of a female software engineer.

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“We have heard from the women with whom we have spoken that there was a culture at Google that objectified women and was filled with stereotyped views about women’s capability,” Finberg said.

Google has become a political flashpoint as it has also faced lawsuits from men alleging that the company was intolerant of white male conservatives. The corporation, however, remains overwhelmingly white, Asian and male. In leadership roles, only 25.5% are women, 2% are black and 1.8% are Latino.

A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the class action.

After the New York Times story was published, CEO Sundar Pichai and Eileen Naughton, vice-president of people operations, sent an email to employees saying that in the last two years, 48 people had been fired for sexual harassment, including 13 who were senior managers and above, and that none of them received exit packages.

“We are dead serious about making sure we provide a safe and inclusive workplace. We want to assure you that we review every single complaint about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct, we investigate and we take action,” they wrote.