Lieff Cabraser Partner Anne Shaver, who represents over 15,000 female Google employee plaintiffs in the Google Gender Discrimination case, was featured on Yahoo Finance’s Yahoo Money Live on Tuesday, June 21 in an interview discussing the case’s recent and historic $118 million settlement. The interview also included named plaintiff Kelli Wisuri, who worked at Google in executive management with some of the company’s biggest clients, yet was denied the compensation received by male employees with equal experience. Wisuri stated, “when I finally decided to leave Google– this is when it really hit home for me– I was asked to write a job description for my replacement. And the minimum required level for my job that I was already doing was two whole levels above my own. That means that I would have needed to be promoted twice, which at Google can take years, to qualify for the job that I was already doing.” The rampant discrimination reflected in the unequal compensation involved throughout laid the predicate for the lawsuit.
As part of the settlement, Google has agreed to compensate class members with a $118 million payout, with the amount of relief paid to each class member to be determined by a calculated formula. Equally important, the settlement mandates that Google accept third party monitoring in order to ensure equitable treatment of its employees going forward. The settlement further includes additional measures to facilitate policy and practice changes at Google. Anne noted, “We negotiated for robust policy and practice changes at Google, which include the hiring of an independent industrial organizational psychologist to study Google’s process for setting level at time of hire and make recommendations on how that process can be made more equitable [and including] an independent labor economist to study Google’s annual pay equity process and make recommendations on how that process and the methodology for that process might be tweaked to ensure pay equity for all at Google. And, additionally, the retention of an independent third party to monitor and report out on all of these efforts, on an annual and ongoing basis.”
Toward the end of the interview, the Yahoo Finance moderator asked Kelli Wisuri what she would you like to see from Google management going forward: “I would love to see more women in leadership. Because when women are in leadership, these issues tend to get looked at more and taken more seriously.”
Watch the full interview on Yahoo Finance here.
The Google Gender Discrimination Lawsuit and Settlement
You can learn more about the Google Gender Discrimination lawsuit and the legal rights of women who have been harmed by high-tech and other corporate gender discrimination by visiting http://www.googlegendercase.com.
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