Justina Jong's revelation that she is paid less at Apple because she is a girl got here from an unexpected source: an office printer.
That's in line with a lawsuit filed Thursday alleging that Apple systematically paid hundreds of ladies lower than men. On the printer at Apple's Sunnyvale office where Jong worked was a W-2 tax form belonging to a male colleague who did the identical work as her, Jong said.
“He made almost $10,000 more than I did,” said Jong, a training manager in Apple’s marketing department.
Apple, whose stock is valued at $3.3 trillion, didn’t reply to requests for comment on Thursday.
Jong, who has been with Apple for greater than a decade, and Amina Salgado, one other longtime Apple worker and AppleCare manager, filed the lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against the Cupertino-based iPhone and App Store giant, alleging that Apple underpaid greater than 12,000 women in its development, marketing and “AppleCare” warranty departments.
Jong and Salgado are in search of a category motion lawsuit and a court order awarding back pay plus 10 percent interest to the hundreds of current and former female employees who allegedly fell victim to Apple's wage practices over the past 4 years.
“Apple systematically paid women less compensation than men with similar education and experience,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit once more sheds light on The male-dominated technology industry in Silicon Valley. In 2022, Google agreed to pay $118 million to as much as 15,500 women to settle a years-long class motion lawsuit accusing the Mountain View-based company of discriminating against female employees. Four plaintiffs accused Google of latest diversity report shows that a couple of third of the workforce is female, that female staff have lower pay grades than men, that ladies get lower-paying jobs, that ladies are promoted more slowly and fewer steadily, and that female staff are generally paid lower than men for similar work. latest report shows an identical gender distribution.
This week's lawsuit against Apple alleges that Apple asked prospective recent employees about their previous salary through late 2017, which led to the corporate giving women a lower starting salary than men for a similar work. Jong, who was hired in 2013, was offered “substantially the same base salary she received in her previous job,” the lawsuit says. Salgado, who was hired in 2012, later complained to Apple several times that she was being paid less due to her gender, and an investigation by a third-party company hired by Apple confirmed the underpayment, the lawsuit says. Apple increased Salgado's salary but refused to pay her salary “for the years she earned less than men,” the lawsuit says.
According to the lawsuit, after the brand new law got here into effect, Apple began asking applicants about their salary expectations. Studies have shown that applicants' stated salary expectations are frequently only barely higher than their previous salary. Apple's use of this information to set salaries “has the effect of perpetuating past pay disparities and paying women less than men,” the lawsuit says.
Because Apple is required by law to maintain records of the wage rates and job classifications of all its employees in California, the corporate knew or must have known that it was underpaying women, “but took no action to correct this inequality,” the lawsuit says.
Over time, the pay gap for female Apple employees widens because salary increases are based on a percentage of base salary, the lawsuit says.
Apple also pays bonuses to staff the corporate considers “talented,” and in line with the lawsuit, “more men are considered talented.”
The lawsuit also seeks an injunction prohibiting Apple from paying women lower than men for a similar work.
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