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A former employee of Google sued the company on Friday, alleging that it systematically discriminated against black workers by placing them in lower-level jobs, underpaying them, and blocking opportunities for advancement.

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 her dismissal in 2020. While there, Ms. Curley helped bring Black employees to the company by designing programs to recruit from historically Black colleges and universities.

“Google is engaged in a nationwide pattern or practice of willful racial discrimination and retaliation and maintains employment policies and practices that have a different effect against Black employees in the United States,” the complaint said.

A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.

The lawsuit reflects many of the complaints Black employees have voiced over the years about working at Google. Despite becoming 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 highly paid engineering personnel.

according to that 2021 diversity report4.4 percent of Google’s US employees were “Black+,” which included employees who identified as multiple races, one of whom was 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 systematically hires Black employees at a lower job status than is appropriate for their experience. Because pay depended on job levels, this allowed the company to pay Black employees lower than their peers.

The complaint was that Qualified Black candidates were generally considered not “Googly” enough – an arbitrary designation that was a “dog whistle” for racial discrimination, the complaint prompted. He also said the company deliberately “endangered” black job candidates with tough questions, accusing Google of hiring Black workers in lower-level jobs with lower pay and less advancement potential so they failed interviews.

Ms Curley also said she was exposed to a hostile work environment. She said that during her six years at the company, executives often confused her with two other Black female colleagues. She said she and her colleagues are not allowed to speak or make presentations at important meetings and feel humiliated and sexualized when a manager asks which colleagues she wants to sleep with.

The lawsuit said Ms Curley’s salary was reduced and she was reprimanded for speaking out at team meetings in 2019 and challenging internal practices. A year later, the company put Ms. Curley on a performance improvement plan and fired her. in September 2020.