A former Google employee sued the company Friday, claiming it systematically discriminated against black workers by putting them in lower jobs, underpaying them and denying them opportunities to get ahead.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, seeks class action status. The plaintiff is April Curley, who worked at Google from 2014 until she was fired in 2020. While there, Ms. Curley helped bring black employees into the company by designing programs to recruit from historically black colleges and universities.
“Google is engaged in a nationwide pattern or practice of intentional racial discrimination and retaliation and enforcing employment policies and practices that have a disparate impact on black workers in the United States,” the complaint reads.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit mirrors many of the complaints black employees have made over the years about working at Google. While it has grown into one of the largest private employers in the United States, the company has struggled to increase racial and gender diversity among its workforce, especially among its highly paid technical staff.
According to the 2021 diversity report, 4.4 percent of Google’s U.S. employees were “Black+,” including employees who identify as more than one race, one of which is black. That’s well below the national average of 9.1 percent for digital publishing and search companies, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The lawsuit said Google was systematically hiring black employees with lower job status than was appropriate for their experience. Because pay is linked to job levels, the company was able to underpay black employees compared to their peers.
Qualified black candidates were often not deemed “Googly” enough — an arbitrary designation that was a “dog whistle” for racial discrimination, the complaint said. The company also said the company often “blurred” black applicants with deliberately difficult questions so that they would do poorly in interviews, and it accused Google of hiring black employees for lower-paid and lower-ranking jobs with less advancement potential.
Ms. Curley also said she was subject to a hostile work environment. During her six years with the company, she said, managers often mistook her for two other black female colleagues. She said she and those colleagues were not allowed to speak or present at important meetings and that she had felt humiliated and sexualized when a manager asked which colleagues she wanted to sleep with.
The lawsuit said Ms. Curley’s pay was cut and she was reprimanded for speaking out in team meetings and challenging internal practices in 2019. A year later, the company imposed a performance improvement plan on Ms. Curley and terminated her employment in September 2020.
