Stage set for landmark equal pay lawsuit: What’s at stake in Google’s HR nightmare?
After the PR nightmare it suffered following a male staffer’s memo on “gender stereotypes,” Google is now facing an even bigger headache — a pay-discrimination claim that could become a class-action suit with thousands of class members.
Google has just been hit with a lawsuit for gender-based pay discrimination by three female former workers who are attempting to seek class status for their suit.
The three employees who filed the suit quit after being placed in career tracks that they claim would pay them less than their male counterparts.
If class status is granted, thousands of Google employees in California would be seeking lost wages as well as a portion of the company’s profits.
This lawsuits comes on the heels of a federal labor investigation into Google’s pay practices. The preliminary finding of that investigation uncovered systematic pay discrimination among 21,000 employees at Google’s headquarters. The initial stages of the review found women earned less than men in nearly every job classification.