SAN FRANCISCO – The gender wage gap has been slowly shrinking over the past decades, but in tech giants and other industries the gap is still far from gone.
According to the Government investigators the tech giant Google pays less to the women than men for the same roles.
The US Department of Labor official disclosed the agency’s allegations during a Friday court hearing in San Francisco.
Janette Wipper, a Labor Department regional director said.”We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.”
But Google denied the charges, and said that they pay their male and female employees equally.
Google said in its statement that.”Every year, we do a comprehensive and robust analysis of pay across genders and we have found no gender pay gap.”
Only 19 percent of Google’s tech jobs are held by females. Overall, nearly one-third of Google’s more than 70,000 workers are women.
The Labor Department lawsuit filed in January with the Office of Administrative Law Judges to bar Google from doing business with the federal government unless the internet company turns over confidential information about thousands of its employees.
The complaint alleges that Google has repeatedly refused to provide the Labor Department with employee compensation records and other information as part of an audit designed to ensure the company isn’t discriminating against workers based on gender or race.
In a statement, Google said it has provided most of its records, but has rebuffed some of the agency’s demands as “over broad” and an invasion of employee privacy.
The disclosures have become a source of embarrassment for Google and its technology industry peers, who have repeatedly acknowledged they need to do more to hire women, blacks and Hispanics.