A federal jury in New York decided Friday that Google discriminated against a female executive due to her gender by hiring her at a lower, lesser-paid position than her male peers and retaliating against her when she complained.
Google is ordered to pay the executive $1.15 million in damages.
Ulku Rowe, an engineering director in Google Cloud’s office of the CTO, sued Google in September 2019, claiming that she was hired at a lower level and earned less than men in similar roles at the company, costing her hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Rowe’s complaint also alleged that she was denied additional earned compensation granted to her male peers and was passed over for a promotion that ultimately went to a less qualified man.
In response to Insider’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini first pointed to the jury’s finding that Rowe had been paid and leveled fairly throughout her time at the company. Google contests the discrimination claims.
“We disagree with the jury’s finding that Ms. Rowe was discriminated against on account of her gender or that she was retaliated against for raising concerns about her pay, level, and gender,” Mencini wrote to Insider in an email. We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. We take employee concerns seriously, and we thoroughly investigated Ms. Rowe’s concerns when she raised them and found there was no discrimination or retaliation.”
Rowe joined Google as technical director of financial services at Google Cloud in 2017. She previously worked as a managing director at J.P. Morgan Chase, where she was CTO for credit risk technology.
At Google, Rowe was hired as a “Level 8 director.” Her initial complaint alleged that she told a hiring manager at the time that her background and experience should have warranted a Level 9 position. The hiring manager told Rowe that all technical directors were being hired at Level 8, according to the complaint. Rowe said she learned after accepting the position that Google Cloud had hired male technical directors at Level 9, which pays hundreds of thousands of dollars more per year than a Level 8 role.
Rowe’s lawsuit is not the first time Google has been accused of enforcing unequal pay standards. Last year, Google settled a class-action lawsuit that accused it of underpaying women, agreeing to pay more than $118 million to more than 15,000 employees.
A leaked set of Google salary data submitted by over 12,000 employees showed a small median pay gap between male and female employees. This dataset does not include salary information from all employees from Google as it’s voluntarily submitted.
In 2019, Google ended its forced arbitration policy that would have required Rowe to settle the dispute privately, following a mass walkout by employees protesting the company’s record of sexual misconduct at the company.
Forced arbitration clauses, which strip workers of the right to bring a case against their employer in court, have been scrutinized in recent years. Microsoft, Uber, and Meta joined Google parent Alphabet in getting rid of their forced arbitration clauses. The clauses are meant to keep employer-employee disputes from public view, but they can sometimes backfire on companies. Twitter, the company now known as X, was hit with over 2,000 arbitration cases this year following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.
Salesforce, which does not have a forced arbitration clause, was sued in Texas federal court this year by an employee alleging race-based discrimination in its DEI unit.
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