A complaint has been filed by two female employees against Apple Inc., claiming that the corporation routinely underpays women for work that is equivalent to that of men.
The lawsuit, which was submitted on Thursday to a state court in San Francisco, claims that the tech giant underpays women for equivalent labour because of its recruiting policies and performance assessment system.
The ladies argued that Apple “perpetuated historic pay disparities between men and women” because the company asked employees about their past salaries when determining starting salaries.
Justina Jong, one of the plaintiffs, stated that she was inspired to file the lawsuit after seeing her male coworker’s W2 tax form that had been left on a printer and realising he was getting paid significantly more for comparable work.
A lawyer representing the employees said, “Apple’s policy and practice of collecting such information about pay expectations and using that information to set starting salaries has had a disparate impact on women, and Apple’s failure to pay women and men equal wages for performing substantially similar work is simply not justified under the law.”
Newsng gathered that over 12,000 female workers in Apple’s engineering, marketing, and AppleCare divisions—both current and former—filed the lawsuit in California with Jong and Amina Salgado’s support.
“Apple’s policy and practice of collecting such information about pay expectations and using that information to set starting salaries has had a disparate impact on women, and Apple’s failure to pay women and men equal wages for performing substantially similar work is simply not justified under the law,” Joe Sellers, a lawyer at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC representing the employees, said in a statement.
Newsng understands that there have occasionally been significant settlements from lawsuits alleging salary discrimination against women in the software industry, though these sums can occasionally only amount to a few paychecks per person.
We earlier reported that the attorneys of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said they were considering their legal options in a statement and summoned Apple’s executives to respond to inquiries regarding sourcing minerals from conflict areas in eastern Congo.