Gender discrimination case: Google ordered to pay $1.1 million to female executive
San Francisco: Google Cloud engineering director Ulku Rowe’s lawsuit alleges the company paid higher salaries to less experienced male executives who were hired for similar roles at the same time. A jury in the US has ruled that Google must pay $1.1 million to a company executive who filed a complaint against the tech giant for gender-based discrimination.
He alleged that Google even refused to give him promotion in response to his complaints.
A New York jury ordered Google to pay Rowe for both punitive damages and pain and suffering, Bloomberg Law reports.
In an email to The Verge, Outten & Golden’s attorney Cara Green said that “the unanimous verdict not only validates Rowe’s allegations of misconduct by Google,” but that it sends a message that “discrimination and retaliation in the workplace “Will not be tolerated.”
Green credited this to the efforts of “thousands of Googlers who walked out in 2018 and demanded reforms.”
In 2018, approximately 20,000 Googlers protested against the internet giant’s handling of sexual harassment and, more broadly, its workplace policies around equality and transparency. The protest followed an article in The New York Times that talked about allegations of sexual misconduct against senior executives, particularly Android creator Andy Rubin.
He later denied the claims.
In Rowe’s case, the jury decided that Google had committed gender-based discrimination. When Rowe started at Google in 2017, he had 23 years of experience.
