New details have emerged in the on-going gender discrimination lawsuit against Microsoft Corp.
Women working in U.S.-based technical jobs at Microsoft filed 238 internal complaints about gender discrimination or sexual harassment between 2010 and 2016, according to court filings made public Monday.
Reuters reported that the plaintiffs, who are suing Microsoft for systemically denying pay raises or promotions to women, are trying to cover more than 8,000 women with the class action. Microsoft has denied such a policy exists. The lawsuit was filed in a Seattle federal court in 2015.
Of the 238 filings, 118 of them were gender discrimination complaints. Only one of them was deemed “founded” by Microsoft. In a statement Tuesday, Microsoft said it had a “robust system to investigate concerns raised by employees,” according to Reuters.
An April 2016 Microsoft blog post by Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, also said that the company is dedicated to “equal pay for equal work.” Hogan pointed to internal data that suggested every dollar earned by men in the U.S. women working at Microsoft earned 99.7 cents at the same job title and level.
“I’m encouraged by these results,” she wrote. “We will continue our commitment to equal pay by monitoring this data and publicly disclosing it as part of our annual public diversity and inclusion information and data reporting.”
That data shows that nearly 75 per cent of all Microsoft employees are men. When it comes to leadership positions, Only 19 per cent of them are filled by women.
ITBusiness.ca attempted to get comments from several experts in the field of human resources and professional services for this story – including Deloitte Canada, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture – but those requests were denied.