“Women at Google miss out on thousands of dollars as a result of pay discrimination, lawsuit alleges”, 22 July 2020

Women at Google lose out on thousands of dollars each year compared with men as a result of discriminatory practices including pushing female employees into lower-paying career tracks, a lawsuit has alleged. The women affected encompass a large variety of positions, and more than half are software engineers. David Neumark…, distinguished professor of economics, found in a study cited in the lawsuit…[that] women at Google may be losing out on $17,000 a year…

Under [Google’s job classification]…system, workers in the same “job family”…are “those that are doing similar job duties and responsibilities but stratified at different levels of capabilities or skill sets”. Different levels within each job family come with different salary grades. The lawsuit alleges women were consistently pushed into lower-level job tracks and paid less than men with similar job descriptions. [49%] of people hired as Level 2 software engineers were women but that percentage dropped for higher level positions – 22% for Level 3, 14.2% for Level 4, and 7.2% for Level 5. [One employee]…was asked what she was paid at her previous job and given the same salary at Google.

Google has been running yearly pay equity analyses since 2012, said Eileen Naughton, vice-president of People Operations at [Google]. As a result…, the company made salary adjustments for 2% of employees in 2019, totalling $5.1m. “The claims in this lawsuit are unfounded and we plan to defend our policies and practices,” Naughton said.