The lawsuit is being brought by three women who say they quit Google after being put on tracks that would pay them less than men.
SAN FRANCISCO — Google is being sued for gender pay discrimination, turning up the heat on the Internet giant already facing allegations it shortchanges women.
Three female former Google employees are seeking class action status for the complaint filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The lawsuit comes as the Labor Department investigates systemic pay discrimination at Google. Google says its own analysis found no pay gap.
In a statement to USA TODAY, the Internet giant said it would review the lawsuit but disagreed with « the central allegations. »
The lawsuit is being brought by three women — Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease and Kelli Wisuri — who say they quit Google after being placed at lower job levels, resulting in lower pay and denying them promotions and moves to other teams that would advance their careers.
The plaintiffs allege women at all levels of Google are paid less than men and that women are assigned to lower job tiers with less opportunity for upward mobility.
“Women should have the same opportunities as men, and receive equal pay for substantially similar work, ” plaintiff Kelli Wisuri said in a statement.
Attorney James Finberg of Altshuler Berzon who, with attorney Kelly M. Dermody of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, is representing the women, says Google has long been aware of the problem and has done nothing to fix it.
The Labor Department’s investigation prompted Finberg to ask female Google employees to come forward if they had experienced pay discrimination. He and the other lawyers heard from 90 current and former employees.
« That’s a strong outpouring of dissatisfaction, » Finberg said. « The stories of the women were consistent with what the Labor Department found, that women are paid less in every category. »
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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. »
« 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, » she said in a statement.
Scrutiny of Google has intensified since the Labor Department began examining possible pay disparities. In April, a Labor Department official said investigators had found « systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire work force. »
In July, a judge ordered Google to hand over employee records to federal investigators from the Labor Department probing the alleged gender pay gap at the Internet giant.
Google, which three years ago pledged to close the race and gender gap to make its workforce better reflect the panoply of people it serves around the globe, is still overwhelmingly male and employs very few African Americans and Hispanics.
Allegations of pay disparities come at a tense time for Google, which last month fired an employee, James Damore, who wrote an internal memo suggesting men are better suited for tech jobs than women.
A spreadsheet obtained by USA TODAY and first reported by the New York Times last week found that women are paid less than men at most job levels at Google and that disparity only widens at more senior levels.
Google says the spreadsheet, which contains information supplied by employees, does not paint an accurate picture of compensation because it does not take into consideration key factors such as where an employee is based as well as that employee’s tenure and job performance.
The spreadsheet was started by a former employee, Erica Baker. By tracking salaries, she hoped to bring to light any disparities for women or people of color and help her colleagues negotiate higher compensation. In 2015 she alleged the spreadsheet revealed « not great things » about pay equality at the Internet giant.
Baker told USA TODAY that Google should make this kind of pay data available to employees so they don’t have to collect it themselves.
« I would also encourage them to understand and eliminate the biased practices in place that result in pay disparities, » she said.
One of the plaintiffs in the gender pay gap lawsuit, Kelly Ellis, says she was assigned to a lower rung than men when she was hired as a software engineer on the Google Photos team in 2010.
She was brought in at that lower rung, one she says is typically given to college graduates, even though she had four years of engineering experience. Despite receiving positive performance reviews, she says she was denied a promotion.
Holly Pease, who managed software engineers, and Wisuri, a salesperson, allege they, too, were assigned to lower levels than men, stymying their efforts to climb the ranks at Google.
« My hopes for the Google suit: to force not only Google, but other companies to change their practices and compensate EVERYONE fairly, » Ellis said in a tweet.
