14 DAY TRIAL // With as much as Google talks about equality, you'd think they'd be the ones leading the change, paying women as much as they pay men. The reality, however, is rather different.
According to the US Department of Labor, there are systemic compensation disparities against women "pretty much across the entire workforce," the Guardian reports.
Google denies allegations and says they hadn't even heard about this issue until Janette Wipper, Labor Department regional director, testified in front of a court in San Francisco.
"Every year, we do a comprehensive and robust analysis of pay across genders, and we have found no gender pay gap," Google said in an official statement.
The company, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. nowadays, has been one of the many tech companies in the Valley that have been trying to improve hiring practices by employing more women, paying more, and so on, in order to step away from the stereotype of tech workers being white and Asian men.
Despite all their efforts, Google's own reports indicate that only 19% of Google's tech jobs are held by women, while overall, only one-third of Google's 70,000 workers are women.
Widespread investigation
The investigation from the Labor Department is a result of a lawsuit filed at the beginning of the year which seeks to bar Google from doing business with the federal government unless the company complies with an audit of its employee compensation records. The company has provided the Labor Department with some of the records it has, but withheld others that it believed would violate workers' privacy.
Google, much like other companies in the tech community, have been struggling to bring more equality to the workforce, mostly unsuccessfully. This has brought them a lot of criticism, and rightfully so.
The Labor Department has been looking into Silicon Valley companies and the way they pay employees, as well as how they discriminate people when hiring. Since it is in its powers to vet companies that bid on government contracts, it has every right to do so. Oracle Corp has already been sued by the Labor Department earlier this year under the claim that the software maker pays white male workers more than their female and non-white counterparts.