Judge dismisses Google’s pay discrimination lawsuit; here’s what you should know

Google is not the first tech giant accused of gender discrimination. Prior to this, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft have also been accused of gender disparity

By: News Desk |
December 7, 2017 4:47 pm

Google is safe– at least for now! A California state judge has dismissed a class action lawsuit filed by the female employees of Alphabet Inc accusing the tech giant of gender-based pay discrimination.

Superior court judge Mary Wiss said that the lawsuit was inappropriate as it was filed on behalf of all the women for Google in California, Reuters reported. She asked the plaintiffs to file a new complaint on behalf of the three women who had faced pay discrimination within 30 days.

The judge also said that two of the three plaintiffs hadn’t proven that the work they had done was comparable to that done by men who were allegedly paid more.

James Finberg, civil rights attorney who is handling the lawsuit said that he would file a new complaint by early January.

The case
Earlier in September this year, more than 60 of Google’s former and current women employees had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company alleging that the company had paid them less than the men despite having equal qualifications and performing similar work.

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According to a report by The Guardian, Finberg had said that several women he interviewed said that they made nearly $40,000 (Rs 25,82,600 approx) less than their male colleagues. Google, however, had vehemently denied the charges filed against it.

Silicon Valley plagued by gender bias
This is not the first time that a tech giant has been accused of gender-based pay discrimination. Back in March 2015, Tina Huang had accused Twitter of discriminating against women in the way the company promoted its employees internally. Huang said that the microblogging site had no formal method of granting promotions, instead, it relied on a ‘shoulder tap’ process to elevate women to top engineering positions.

In September 2015, a former Microsoft employee– Katie Moussouris— had accused the company of passing her over for more than one promotions while male colleagues, who were less qualified, were promoted.

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Earlier this year, Facebook’s female engineers accused the social media giant of gender bias over coding. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the codes written by women were rejected more frequently than the codes written by their male counterparts.