A brand new lawsuit in opposition to Google accuses the corporate of fostering a “racially biased company tradition” that gives Black staff decrease pay and fewer alternatives to advance than their white counterparts, studies Reuters. Filed on Friday with a federal courtroom in San Jose, California, the grievance alleges the corporate subjected former variety recruiter April Curley and different present and former Black staff to a hostile work surroundings.
In 2014, Google employed Curley to design a program to attach the corporate with Black faculties. Shortly afterward, she claims she was subjected to denigrating feedback from her managers, who allegedly stereotyped her as an “offended” black girl whereas passing her over for promotions.
“While Google claims that they have been trying to improve variety, they have been really undervaluing, underpaying and mistreating their Black staff,” Curley’s lawyer informed Reuters. The grievance notes Black individuals make up solely 4.4 p.c of staff at Google and roughly 3 p.c of its management.
We’ve reached out to Google for remark.
Curley shouldn’t be the primary individual to accuse Google of fostering a piece surroundings hostile to Black staff and different individuals of colour. In the aftermath of Timnit Gebru’s controversial exit from the corporate, Alex Hanna, a former worker with the tech big’s Ethical AI analysis group, mentioned she determined to go away Google after changing into uninterested in its structural deficiencies. “In a phrase, tech has a whiteness drawback,” Hanna wrote on Medium on the time. “Google is not only a tech group. Google is a white tech group.”