Two female Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) employees filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday, alleging that the Cupertino-based tech giant pays women less than men for the same work. Silicon Valley has seen similar lawsuits in recent years over gender pay inequality.
What Happened: The Wall Street Journal reported the lawsuit filing on Thursday.
The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco state court, alleges that Apple’s hiring and performance-review practices promote unfair wage inequality between women and men. A lead attorney on the case represented employees in similar lawsuits against Google and Oracle resulting in multi-million dollar settlements.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Justina Jong, reported finding a male coworker’s W2 on a printer at Apple’s Sunnyvale, California, branch. and discovered that her co-worker made $10,000 more in base salary than she did for the same work, according to WSJ.
A key issue in the lawsuit is a 2018 California law that banned employers from basing compensation on prior employee pay. The lawsuit alleges that Apple did not heed this law by asking prospective employees about pay expectations. The filing argues that asking employees about pay expectations perpetuates historical pay gaps.
The lawsuit also claims that Apple’s performance reviews give higher performance ratings to men than women in intangible categories such as leadership, the Journal reports.
Why it Matters: The gender wage gap between men and women is well-documented; an often-cited statistic argues that women, on average, earn 21% less than men for the same work, although the statistic has its detractors. Reports show that offering women equal pay in the workplace leads to a net-positive effect in the global economy.
While many corporations have embraced social issues in recent years, critics such as The Daily Show’sJon Stewart have bemoaned that companies abandon said values when it affects their bottom line.
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