June 14, 2024
The plaintiffs, who still work for the Bay Area tech giant, are hoping to win money for 12,000 California women.
Two Apple workers launched a major gender discrimination lawsuit against their employer Thursday, accusing the Bay Area tech giant of willfully paying thousands of California women less than men for similar work.
Plaintiffs Justina Jong and Amina Salgado filed the suit as a class-action complaint, proposing a class of 12,000 California women who work in Apple’s engineering, marketing and AppleCare divisions or who worked in one of those divisions over the past four years. They allege that Apple’s pay policies “systematically” leave women with lower wage rates than men and are seeking back pay, interest and damages.
The complaint alleges a few forms of bias at Apple, including in its performance evaluation system and practice of selecting employees for higher pay. But the company’s alleged policy of asking hires for their pay expectations is at the core of the complaint. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jim Finberg, told SFGATE that pay expectations are basically a proxy for prior pay, which California has banned employers from asking of hires.
“Part of this case is, you know, to get people back pay, but a big part of it is to change the way Apple operates,” Finberg said. “So that going forward, it’s a more fair, equitable system.”
The lawyer said that asking women about pay expectations “locks” past pay discrimination in and that the requirements of a job should determine pay. Finberg isn’t new to the fight over tech pay; he represented employees suing Oracle and Google for gender-based pay discrimination, securing $25 million and $118 million settlements, respectively.
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The suit alleges that because Apple has records on wage rates and job classifications across the company, the “substantial pay disparities” are willful. As the litigation progresses, those records will likely go before analysts, Finberg said, who will look at trends in the data.
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Contact Us
Cohen Milstein is partnering with Jim Finberg at Altshuler Berzon, as well as Outten & Golden on representing the women in this class action lawsuit.
If you are a current or former Apple employee in California and you believe you may have been impacted by this allegedly discriminatory pay practice by Apple, please contact one of our team members below:
Joe Sellers, Esq. and Phoebe Wolfe, Esq. at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC – T: 202-408-4600
Jim Finberg, Esq. and Eve Cervantes, Esq. at Altshuler Berzon – T: 415- 421-7151
Adam T. Klein, Esq. and Chauniqua Young, Esq. at Outten & Golden LLP – T: 212-658-0349
Read Apple Hit With Gender Discrimination Suit by SF Lawyer Who Won $118 Million From Google.