Women face pay inequality and have no path for advancement at Google, lawsuit claims

Three women who say they faced discrimination in salary and promotions at Google are hoping to turn their experiences into a class-action lawsuit.

A trio of former Google employees filed a lawsuit against the tech giant on Thursday that alleges that the company systematically paid women less for the same work and denied them opportunities for advancement, the Guardian reported.

“Google has discriminated and continues to discriminate against its female employees by systematically paying them lower compensation than Google pays to male employees performing substantially similar work under similar working conditions,” the lawsuit says.

Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri filed the lawsuit on behalf of all women who have worked for Google in California over the past four years. That means more Google employees—including those who earned less than their male colleagues, were denied promotions, or otherwise faced discrimination at work—could join on, turning the lawsuit into a major class-action case.

The lawsuit hits Google just over a month after engineer James Damore's memo arguing that women are biologically unsuited for careers in tech went public, causing an uproar against Google and leading to his firing. Months before that, the Department of Labor started investigating Google for pay discrimination.

Google is just one example of how women throughout Silicon Valley are routinely undervalued and excluded from opportunities.

Ellis, the lead plaintiff on this case, told the Guardian that male engineers with similar or lesser qualifications were assigned to more prestigious and higher-paying jobs. She also witnessed segregation between women working the less prestigious front-end engineering jobs and men who got the more coveted back-end jobs.

Pease was excluded from the technical career track and classified as non-technical despite having a technical background, the lawsuit said.

Wisuri described being placed on the lowest rung at Google after the company acquired her startup. She eventually quit after seeing a lack of opportunities for advancement for women.

Google pushed back against the allegations.

"We work really hard to create a great workplace for everyone, and to give everyone the chance to thrive here. In relation to this particular lawsuit, we’ll review it in detail, but we disagree with the central allegations," Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano said. "Job levels and promotions are determined through rigorous hiring and promotion committees, and must pass multiple levels of review, including checks to make sure there is no gender bias in these decisions. And we have extensive systems in place to ensure that we pay fairly. But on all these topics, if we ever see individual discrepancies or problems, we work to fix them, because Google has always sought to be a great employer, for every one of our employees."