Google’s former employee slams ‘black discrimination’ lawsuit against company

On Friday, a former Google worker filed a lawsuit accusing the tech titan of discriminating against her and other Black employees, TopNaija reports.

April Curley contended in the suit that she was undermined and ultimately fired for advocating reform of “barriers and double standards” imposed on Black Google employees.

“Black Google employees face a hostile work environment and suffer retaliation if they dare to challenge or oppose the company’s discriminatory practices,” the suit alleged.

Google hires few Black workers and steers them into low-level jobs with doors to career advancement kept closed due to their race, according to the suit.

Google is yet to respond to a request for comment.

Curley was hired by Google in 2014 as a university programs specialists in New York City to reach out to Black college students as potential employees, according to the filing

“She discovered that Google was not genuinely interested in actual diversity and equal employment opportunities but wanted only to burnish its public image for marketing purposes,” the suit contended.

Curley was terminated from her position by Google in late 2020, according to the filing.

“While Google claims that they were looking to increase diversity, they were actually undervaluing, underpaying, and mistreating their Black employees, leading to high turnover,” said Curley’s attorney, Ben Crump.

The suit filed in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose seeks class-action status to represent other Black Google employees.

Curley’s lawyers cited statistics indicating that as of last year, some 4.4 percent of Google employees are Black and that a scant three percent of people in management positions are Black.

They also told the court that the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing is investigating Google’s treatment of Black female employees.

For years Black men in the tech industry have said they have faced disparaging comments and discouraging experiences, such as being shut out of offices because security guards and colleagues questioned whether they actually worked there.

As more Black women have joined the workforce, such complaints have increased. Seven current and former Google employees told Reuters this year about being marginalized on projects as Black women and not taken as seriously as colleagues with different backgrounds.

Artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru has said Google fired her a year ago for criticizing its lack of workforce diversity and for fighting managers who objected to publishing a critical paper she co-wrote. Erika Munro Kennerly, who oversaw diversity and strategy teams at Google before resigning last year, told magazine Corporate Counsel in January that “there’s an overall tone of being undervalued” as a Black woman at Google.

Workers identifying as “Black+ female” left Google at the highest rate of any racial-gender group other than “Native “American+ female” last year, according to company data. Google last year said it planned to boost retention by increasing support staffing and programs