Google-owner agrees on back pay for women
Google-owner Alphabet will pay USD 3.8 million in order to settle cases of underpaid women. The company was accused of underpaying women and unfairly having passed over women and Asians for job openings. The agreement was announced by the US Department of Labour. Google said it was pleased to have resolved the matter.
The settlement includes USD 2.6 million in back pay to 5 500 employees and job candidates. Google will also reserve USD 1.25 million for pay adjustments for engineers in Mountain View, Kirkland, Seattle and New York over the next five years. Money not used will be spent on diversity efforts at Google.
The company said in a statement, “We believe everyone should be paid based upon the work they do, not who they are, and invest heavily to make our hiring and compensation processes fair and unbiased.”
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs had found “preliminary indicators” that Google 2014 – 2017 at times had underpaid 2 783 women working at the company´s software engineering group at the company headquarter in Mountain View, California.
Investigators said the company had disadvantaged women and Asian candidates for software engineering roles in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, California, and Kirkland, Washington.
According to Google’s own data, overall in 2020 workforce representation saw a slight increase for most underrepresented groups: women represented 32% of Google’s global workforce, up from 31.6% the previous year, and Black and Latinx employees represented 9.6% of the U.S. workforce, up from 9%. Global hires of female employees decreased from 33.2% in 2018 to 32.5% in 2019, while male hires increased from 66.8% to 67.5%, while the percentage of women hired for technical positions remained basically the same from 25.6% to 25.7%.
Even though the company reported the largest increase in hiring of Black+ technical employees that has ever been measured, its workforce remains disproportionately white, Asian and male.
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