This Exec Is Forcing Google Into Its First Trial Over Sexist Pay Discrimination

Google Cloud director Ulku Rowe says she was underpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s set to be the first case to reach trial since an employee revolt led Google to drop forced arbitration.

By Caitlin Harrington, October 2, 2023

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.

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Arjuna Capital, a social impact investment firm, puts out a scorecard each year assessing companies’ commitments to gender and racial pay equity and transparency. This year, Google’s parent company Alphabet earned an F. In 2016, Arjuna began filing shareholder proposals to get the company to release pay equity data. “Google at that time was a case study in what not to do when it came to gender equity,” says managing partner Natasha Lamb. She says the company finally began releasing some limited data in 2018, but has since stopped doing even that.

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