Three former Google employees filed a lawsuit on Thursday claiming the internet behemoth discriminated against women in pay and promotions. This is the latest incident to question some of Google's practices in a tumultuous year for the tech giant.
The three women filed a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that Google put them in lesser jobs than their male colleagues, which resulted in lower pay, and denied them promotions that would have advanced their careers. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said more than 90 former and current Google employees admitted to facing discrimination, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Google, now part of parent company Alphabet, said there is no pay gap among its employees and disagreed "with the central allegations," according to The Wall Street Journal.
This comes just nine months after the Labor Department sued Google for not handing over 19 years of pay data on 21,000 Google employees for a routine audit into the company's pay methods, as part of that department's attempt to show Google's hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, gender, or other factors. However, in July, an administrative law judge denied the government's request and ruled that the inquiry was overly broad and violated Google employee privacy.
In August, Google fired James Damore after the engineer published a memo claiming the company's pay gap was a result of biological differences and not systematic sexism.