Google has agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by current and former Black workers alleging the tech giant discriminated against them by systematically paying them less, denying them promotions and leadership roles, and subjecting them to a racially hostile work environment.
The proposed settlement filed in federal court in California on May 8 would benefit about 4,000 Black and “Black+” workers (who are mixed race, including being Black) in California and New York, and still requires a judge’s approval.
The suit was originally filed in 2022 by April Curley, a Black woman who was hired by Google in 2014 to expand its outreach to Black college students and to recruit more Black employees.
According to her complaint, obtained by Atlanta Black Star, only 1.9 percent of Google’s employees identified as Black or African-American when she was hired. Despite a concerted, public relations-driven effort to recruit more Black employees during the national reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by 2021, Google’s workforce was only 4.4 percent Black+, compared to 9.1 percent Black representation in the tech sector, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And only 3 percent of Google’s top leadership was Black.
In her lawsuit, Curley argued that Google’s “anemic diversity statistics” were the result of its discriminatory hiring and employment policies and practices, which include assigning highly qualified Black professionals to lower-level roles, paying them less than non-Black employees, unfairly rating their performance, and denying them advancement and leadership roles because of their race, while steering them into dead-end jobs.
Highlighting her own experience, Curley said that despite having a master’s degree and performing a similar recruiting role at Teach For America for three years, she was hired as a Level 3 employee, which at Google is usually for entry-level, post-bachelor’s degree hires. Over the next six years, she never received a promotion or merit pay increase, despite her “stellar qualifications and performance,” the complaint said.
Curley was frustrated to see that non-Black employees performing the same responsibilities as her were assigned to higher levels, paid more, and supported in ways that made their careers progress. That included a white man on her team who also recruited employees from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), who was placed at Level 4 and soon began earning more than she did.
Nevertheless, she says she succeeded in helping Google establish “a strong pipeline of talented Black engineering candidates,” which led to an increase in Google’s Black technical hiring.
But she contends that effort was constantly stymied by Google’s discriminatory hiring practices, which included screening out Black candidates and assigning them lower scores than similarly qualified and even less qualified non-Black candidates. Recruiters also subjected Black candidates to “culture fit” interviews to assess their “Googleyness,” an ill-defined quality that, if found lacking, often served to deny well-qualified Black applicants jobs and opportunities.
When they did get hired, Black employees were subjected to a hostile workplace in which racial segregation and harassment were commonplace, the lawsuit said.
That included being routinely harassed, stopped and asked to show their identification and work badges, while “non-Black Google employees freely stroll Google’s state-of-the-art workplaces.”
Black employees were frequently subjected to “striking racist and racialized comments by their peers and managers,” the complaint alleged.
Plaintiff Desiree Mayon, a Black woman who worked as a technical program manager and came to Google with two bachelor’s degrees, 18 years of experience managing technical software projects and the ability to code in seven languages, said colleagues told her she was “not smart enough to be technical,” “incompetent,” “needs to learn how to speak proper English,” a “b-tch,” and “aggressive.”
Mayon said she was regularly badge-checked by Google employees and once told she could not use the only women’s restroom in the building. When she did anyway, the employee “chased her around the bathroom” and said, “Your people are not welcome here,” referring to African-Americans.
One Google colleague allegedly told her, “I thought Black people didn’t get sunburns” as it was “historically impossible” due to enslaved Africans working outside all day at plantations.
Another reportedly ordered her to ask, “How can I serve you?” before addressing him.
When she complained about racial hostility and other racial discrimination to HR, Google’s Chief of Staff allegedly dismissed Mayon’s concerns and ordered her not to “bring her Blackness to work.” Another manager responded to her complaints by slamming his door, which hit her in the face. Instead of apologizing, he said, “It is always something with you,” and stormed off.
Plaintiff Ronika Lewis worked as a Senior Program Manager from February 2020 to March 2023 and led coronavirus testing sites as part of Google’s partnership with the White House. She earned accolades for her performance, including a Google Citizenship Award. Despite this, Google denied her promotions and pay increases, the complaint said, while awarding her white peers with higher pay and bonuses for doing the same work.
Meanwhile, Lewis said she endured severe and pervasive racial harassment, including being told:
“You’re not smart enough to work at Google.”
“You should be a DoorDash driver instead of working at Google,” and
“I want to see you take a bone off someone’s plate and bite into it” at a Google-sponsored country club event.
Lewis repeatedly complained and reported to numerous supervisors Google’s discriminatory pay, treatment and hostile work environment, the lawsuit said, and was told by Google’s HR Department that she was not being “Googley,” a term the plaintiffs call a “racist dog whistle” that is “essentially code for racial discrimination.”
After she joined the class action lawsuit in June 2022, Lewis said she faced retaliation that included substantial new duties without a pay increase or a new title. Meanwhile, she claimed Google revoked her access to necessary software, left her out of important meetings, and gave her an unwarranted poor performance review.
She was terminated after Google said her position was being eliminated due to “changes in business needs” in early 2023, when the company laid off 12,000 employees and, the lawsuit argued, disproportionately fired Black workers.
Plaintiff Rayna Reid was hired by Google in October 2018 and moved from New York to Austin, Texas, to take a job as a staffing specialist. Despite her master’s degree in education, a law degree and seven years of management and legal experience, she was placed as a Level 3 employee because of her race, the complaint said.
After she was told she was not “Googley enough” and “not smiling enough” during a performance review, she said she scrolled through her manager’s social media posts to better understand what being Googley meant. There, she discovered racist anti-Black imagery of a cartoon “Mammy” caricature of an African-American woman smiling and holding a child. Reid’s manager had replaced the child’s face with his own.
“Appalled,” Reid alerted Human Resources for help and to report the discrimination, “to no avail,” the complaint said.
Reid also alleged that colleagues made racist comments about her hair and expressed a variety of racist sentiments, including that “Black men are disgusting.”
During a meeting, a manager “used a Black woman gesture trope and started snapping her fingers around in the air,” the complaint said. Other co-workers regularly mistook her for a cafeteria worker and asked her to restock food.
After complaining about the hostile work environment multiple times, the lawsuit said Reid was put on a performance improvement plan, even though she was “over exceeding” her hiring number goal and outperforming her peers. Then, Google allegedly hired a less educated white man with limited experience as a Level 4 recruiter. Perceiving she was “targeted for termination,” Reid quit her job on MLK Day in January 2020.
Meanwhile, Curley said she was enduring “harassing and hostile actions” from a series of managers.
One manager frequently called Curley and another female manager “girls” and mistook them for each other, calling them by the other’s name.
Another manager refused to let any Black women speak in or present during important meetings, the complaint said.
Curley claimed other managers “demeaned and sexualized” her as a Black woman, including “by asking her which colleagues she wanted to sleep with.”
After she pushed for pay and level increases, and was repeatedly denied, a white manager told Curley at a holiday party that she and other Google employees considered Curley “intimidating,” “unwelcoming” and “angry” — “a stereotype with which Black women in America are all too familiar,” the lawsuit said.
Curley claimed that she was never considered for career advancement opportunities and was reprimanded for speaking up in team meetings and challenging internal practices. In the spring of 2020, Curley joined a group of a dozen Black and Latino employees in her department who gathered to address “the many issues facing people of color at Google.” The group met several times and developed a list of desired reforms.
In “plain retaliation” for her leadership role in this advocacy group, she claimed, in June 2020 Google placed Curley on an informal performance improvement plan (PIP), and then in August warned Curley to either accept severance immediately or be placed on a formal improvement plan.
She opted for the latter and began preparing a detailed report about the company’s racial bias in hiring practices. In response, she claimed, Google ended her PIP early and unlawfully fired her on Sept. 11, 2020, freezing out her access to the document and her ability to complete her report on the online search company’s discriminatory practices.
The amended complaint filed in July 2024 by Curley, Mayon, Lewis, Reid and two Black women denied jobs by Google on behalf of themselves and similarly situated Google employees alleged racial discrimination, sex discrimination, pay discrimination, hostile work environment and retaliation in violation of federal civil rights law, New York human rights law, and California employment law.
In its answer in August of 2024, Google denied all of the allegations in the class action suit and claimed it had legitimate business reasons for any adverse actions it took in relation to the plaintiffs. It further asserted that “any pay differences between them and similarly situated non-white individuals” were based on “a merit system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production and/or a bona fide factor other than race or sex.”
Google said it did not condone or know about any of the discriminatory conduct the individual plaintiffs complained about, and further posited that it had long-standing practices in place to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, and “acted with reasonable care and conformity with its policies and procedures.”
After three years of litigation, including depositions of Google employees and 200,000 pages of documents and workforce data exchanged between the parties, followed by mediation led by a complex class action lawsuit expert, the plaintiffs and Google reached a settlement in March.
Besides establishing a $50 million settlement fund to compensate about 4,000 Black and mixed race settlement members employed by Google between 2017 and 2023, the proposed settlement agreement filed on May 8 includes substantial non-monetary relief for the plaintiffs.
For three years after its effective date, Google will continue to analyze pay “to identify unexplained differences based on race” before finalizing pay changes for the following year. Google will also maintain well-publicized methods for employees to report concerns related to the terms and conditions of their employment, including concerns that they have been treated unfairly or paid incorrectly.
Google will take steps to ensure pay transparency and fairness, including by continuing to list salary ranges in job ads and reaffirming its commitment to not ask for or base compensation decisions at hire on the salary history of applicants.
Through August 2026, Google will not require any employee to enter into mandatory arbitration agreements for employment-related disputes.
While most of the settlement class members will have to release all claims of employment discrimination and retaliation against Google in order to stake a claim to the settlement fund, the three settlement class representatives — Curley, Lewis, and Mayon — may continue to litigate their claims, which have not been settled.
If the proposed settlement is approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore, the three settlement class representatives will each receive $50,000 service awards “as compensation for their considerable efforts on behalf of the class,” which included helping counsel to investigate, to prepare court pleadings and participating in multiple mediation sessions, and for subjecting themselves to intense public scrutiny and possible retaliation.
“Huge respect to the class representatives who stood up and spoke out,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the plaintiffs, posted on X on May 9. “It takes courage to speak your truth against one of the world’s biggest tech companies. Your voices have already sparked change, and that’s power.”
Up to 25 percent of the settlement fund, or $12.5 million, will be reserved for attorneys’ fees, and counsel can claim additional funds for expenses. That leaves about $37 million to be divvied up among the rest of Google’s Black workers in the settlement class, who will not receive a formulaic award, but one based on their individualized claims.
The individual settlement class members can file a claim and participate in a “nuanced and detailed process through which they will receive an individualized assessment” of their claims of discrimination beyond wage disparities, including consideration of post-Google wage loss, emotional distress, as well as the impact of a hostile work environment and wrongful discharge, according to the proposed settlement.
While agreeing to the settlement terms, Google said in a statement, “We strongly disagree with the allegations that we treated anyone improperly and we remain committed to paying, hiring and leveling all employees consistently.”
The company’s pending agreement with Black workers follows a $28 million settlement Google agreed to pay in April for allegedly paying Latino, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander employees less money than white and Asian workers, and a $118 million settlement in 2022 in a class-action suit alleging gender pay discrimination against women employees, noted Sfist.com.
