In 1963, the US first established gender-equitable pay through the Equal Pay Act, effectively criminalising discriminatory pay standards among the sexes. To this day, however, corporations seeking to sidestep this law use various loopholes to ensure that their profits are maximised, at the expense of one sex. Apple Inc. is the latest corporation to come under the limelight for this, as two employees have come forward to serve the Big Tech company with a class action lawsuit that accuses it of having systematically perpetuated gender-discriminatory pay gaps.
In 2018, the state of California, where Apple is headquartered, made it illegal for employers to ask job candidates what their prior pay had been. Employers frequently ask this question during the hiring process in order to secure their candidate by offering a marginally higher salary. This helps companies ensure that they don’t pay candidates more than they strictly have to. Since then, Apple has instead asked prospective employees what their salary expectations were. Their answers frequently tended to be slightly higher than their previous salary figures. In the event that female candidates had experienced gender-differentiated pay in their previous job roles, their asking salaries tended to perpetuate the same gaps. This is because men tended to quote the higher figures they had experienced in the past, while women quoted the lower ones that they did. By doing so, Apple divested itself of the need to maintain its own in-house minimums in salaries and compensations.
The two women who have come forward to sue the company will be representing over 12,000 current and former female employees. Their complaint with the court accuses Apple Inc. of discriminating between genders in both hiring practices and performance evaluations. According to the lawsuit, the company discriminated against women in performance evaluations by rewarding men for the same qualities that women were penalised for. This discrimination took place when evaluating employees for their leadership qualities and their capacity to work as a team. Men tended to be rewarded for their leadership qualities for example, while women exhibiting the same tended to be marked down for being incapable of displaying teamwork. Women who did work well in group situations on the other hand tend to be marked down for not showing enough initiative or leadership. These alleged discriminatory practices then resulted in women missing out on promotions and bonuses while men were disproportionately rewarded.
One other way that the lawsuit accuses the company of having disproportionately rewarded men in ways that discriminated against women. Apple allegedly rewarded employees for their ‘talent’; the parameters for which were never disclosed. This allowed the company to reward employees for these talents by paying them more. However, the company systematically favours men over women in granting this designation.
The statements and complaints made by the two women who have taken the initiative to come forward together shed light on a culture of male bias within Apple Inc. One of the two plaintiffs in the case, Justina Jong is a customer and technical training instructor in the company. She had only become aware of her position within the company’s pay scale when she had caught sight of a copy of a male colleague’s W-2 left behind on the office printer. In a statement quoted in CNN, she remarks: “I noticed that he was being paid almost $10,000 more than me, even though we performed substantially similar work. This revelation made me feel terrible.”
Her grievances with the company did not end there either; her case accuses the company of forcing her to work alongside a co-worker who had harassed her sexually despite her protestations.
Amina Salgado is the other employee who joined forces with Jong to speak out against their employee’s discriminatory practices. She had been vocal about the pay gap she experienced compared to her male colleagues, having worked in the company since 2012. Due to her continued complaints against the system, Apple finally hired a third-party firm to investigate whether her accusations were grounded in facts. The third-party company found that they were, prompting her employers to finally raise her salary to reflect her contributions to the company’s goals. However, as her lawsuit alleges: “As a result of the third-party investigation, in late 2023, Apple increased Ms. Salgado’s compensation prospectively but failed and refused to pay Ms. Salgado back pay for the years during which she was paid less than men performing substantially similar work.”
These accusations therefore allege that Apple violated the State of California’s laws and regulations in relation to the Equal Pay Act, laws pertaining to workplace sex bias, and unfair business practices. In addition to reforming the business’s structure in alignment with the state’s laws, the lawsuit is also seeking compensation for wages lost and declaratory and injunctive relief for all the women affected by Apple’s discriminatory practices.
(Theruni Liyanage)