Google agrees to pay $118m in gender discrimination lawsuit
As part of settling four women’s claims of widespread pay discrimination, the tech giant didn’t say it did anything wrong. The company will also let someone from the outside look at how it does business.
Google has settled a class-action lawsuit that said it routinely paid women less than men. As part of the settlement, Google said it would give $118 million to help women and let outsiders look at its pay practices.
In Ellis v. Google LLC, filed in 2017, three former Google employees said that the company paid women less than men for the same job. A fourth plaintiff was added later. A judge from the San Francisco Superior Court must now approve the Friday settlement. It covers about 15,500 women who have worked for Google in California since September 14, 2013 in 236 different job titles.
Since Google is proud of its egalitarian values, the long-running legal dispute was an awkward topic. It happened at the same time that Microsoft and Oracle were being sued for discrimination against women. The results of these cases have been mixed. Bloomberg Law reported earlier that the women who are suing software company Oracle had a setback Friday when a judge took away their right to sue as a group.
“We strongly believe that our policies and practices are fair, but after almost five years of litigation, both sides agreed that settling the case without any admissions or findings was in everyone’s best interest,” a Google spokesman, Chris Pappas, said in a statement. “We’re very happy that we’ve come to an agreement.” Over the past nine years, Google has looked at pay equity and raised employees’ pay when it was fair to do so, he said.
After the settlement is officially approved, Google will give outside experts three years to figure out how it could improve its pay equity process and be more fair when deciding a new hire’s rank and pay. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Altshuler Berzon, say that there will also be an outside watchdog to see if the company is following the experts’ suggestions.
Holly Pease, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement, “As a woman who has worked in tech her whole life, I’m hopeful that the steps Google has agreed to take as part of this settlement will give women more equality.”
