More than 20,000 fed-up Google employees staged a worldwide walkout in 2018 to demand a safer, fairer workplace for women after scandals over sexual harassment and unequal pay roiled the company. That fight was not an unqualified success: Pay equity data remains scarce and organizers say they suffered retaliation. But one victory—Google’s end to a forced arbitration policy requiring employees to privately settle disputes out of court—is at last bearing fruit.
A pay discrimination trial against Google is scheduled to begin in New York later this week, the first since the company ended forced arbitration. Ulku Rowe, an executive in Google’s cloud unit, alleges that she was hired at a lower level and salary than equally or less qualified men and that Google retaliated when she complained, denying her promotion opportunities and even demoting her.
Barring a last minute settlement, the trial will offer a rare glimpse into how executives set pay and choose who gets to advance inside a tech giant that has long sought to shroud those details from the public. Google Cloud’s CTO, Will Grannis, and its former president, Tariq Shaukat, are due to testify.
The costs and uncertainty of a trial combined with a fear of airing dirty laundry cause companies to settle most pay discrimination lawsuits, says Alex Colvin, dean of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Last year, the US government outlawed forced arbitration in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases, but half of US employers still mandate it for other disputes. Rowe would not be scheduled to have her day in court if the walkout had not forced Google to end the practice. “I think that’s a good illustration of why there’s still a push to extend that law to other kinds of cases, including other kinds of gender discrimination,” Colvin says.
Google hired Rowe, formerly a CTO at JPMorgan Chase, as a technical director of financial services at Google Cloud in 2017. According to filings for the case headed for trial this week, she was the only woman among 17 people hired for technical director roles at Google over a two-year period. Some, including Rowe, were brought on at level 8 on Google’s internal hierarchy, while others were hired at level 9, a notch below vice president.
When Rowe expressed concern that she had been underleveled, she alleges a hiring manager told her, apparently incorrectly, that everyone in those roles was hired at the lower level and that she would be promoted to a VP position leading the financial services group once Google Cloud reorganized. The difference in compensation between the two levels has cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, according to court filings.
Rowe alleges that one of her managers excluded her from meetings, email lists, and team offsites that her male colleagues were invited to. When the VP role that she had been promised opened up, Rowe says, the manager did not initially consider her for the position. She claims that Google Cloud’s CTO had separately told her she was the most qualified candidate. Google gave the job to a man who was less qualified, her complaint claims. Rowe says that after she complained she had been discriminated against, managers retaliated by demoting her and declining to interview her when she later expressed interest in another VP position she was qualified for.
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