Google discriminates against men and underpays women – lawsuits

Google has been accused, in two separate lawsuits, of discriminating against conservative white men and underpaying female employees.

The most recent suit comes from James Damore, the fired author of a sexist memo circulated around the company last year.

In the memo, Damore argued that women are biologically ill-equipped for senior engineering positions, and that Google’s diversity efforts should be examined in regards to their “costs and benefits”.

He was fired for advancing harmful gender stereotypes and violating the company’s code of conduct. Now, Damore is fighting back.

James Damore is suing Google for firing him after releasing a memo deeming women biologically unfit for tech

“Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender,” reads Damore’s lawsuit. He also claims that the company uses illegal quotas to hire women and other members of minority groups.

When the memo was first released, Google’s VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown, said that while the company welcomes “alternative views”, those views need to be in line with “principles of equal employment found in [Google’s] Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws”.

“We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore’s lawsuit in court,” the company said in a statement, according to The Verge.

But Google isn’t only accused of leaning too far left; the company is also embroiled in a suit accusing it of systematically underpaying women.

Google is also being sued for allegedly systematically underpaying its female employees

In September last year, a suit filed on behalf of all women hired by the company in California since 2013 claimed the company consistently pays men more for doing similar work as women in similar conditions.

The claims lined up with the US Department of Labour, which requested the company release its salary data and documents to the government in January last year, later revealing that it had evidence of pay discrimination.

Google regularly releases a “comprehensive and robust analysis of pay across genders“. In April, the company wrote that it had “closed the gender pay gap globally“.

Now, the company must battle both suits, with one claiming the company is doing too much to diversify its payroll, and the other claiming it isn’t doing enough.

Featured image: Ben Nuttall via Flickr (CC 2.0 BY-SA, edited)