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A lawsuit filed Friday alleges Google has a systematic racial bias against black employees.
The lawsuit argues that the tech company gave them lower-level jobs, paid them less, and denied advancement opportunities because of race.
A complaint seeking class action status accuses Google of having a “racially biased company culture.”
“Black Googlers face a hostile work environment and face retaliation if they dare to challenge or oppose the company’s discriminatory practices,” the complaint states.
According to Google’s annual diversity report, only 4.4% of Google’s 156,500 employees are black, and only 3% of the company’s leadership positions.
“While claiming they wanted to increase diversity, Google undervalued, underpaid and mistreated its Black employees,” Ms Curley’s lawyer, Ben Crump, told Reuters.
This isn’t the first time Google has been accused of racial misconduct. Reuters reported in December that California’s Fair Employment and Housing Department was investigating the company for mistreatment of black female workers.
Ms. Curley’s lawsuit seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages and lost damages to current and former black employees of Google. The lawsuit also hopes to restore current and former black employees to their positions and seniority.
When Ms. Curley was hired in 2014, only 1.9% of Google employees were black. The company added five white top executives over the next two years, but only one black executive remained.
Ms Curley, a diversity worker at Google, shared her experience on Twitter in December 2020, two months after she was fired.
Ms Curley said she “repeatedly refused promotion, cut my compensation, placed in performance improvement plans, denied leadership opportunities, shouted, [and] deliberately excluded from meetings.”
“My jump-level manager, a white woman, told me on VERBATIM that the way I speak (often with a heavy Baltimore accent) is an internal barrier I need to disclose when meeting people,” she added.
This white woman also said that she never felt comfortable supporting my job because she was “intimidated” by me and therefore never saw me as leadership opportunities.
— Real Abril🌈 (@RealAbril) 21 December 2020
On Twitter, Ms Curley did not name names, but a Google spokesperson denied her allegations.
“We disagree with the way April defined the termination, but it’s not appropriate for us to comment on its allegations,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in December 2020.
According to Ms. Curley, she was hired to change Google’s relationship with Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Ms Curley said that when she got hired, they “scanned” the resumes of students who went to universities that her colleagues didn’t know about.
Ms. Curley claims hiring managers have questioned HBCU’s computer science curricula and said their education is inferior to elite, white institutions.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
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