Apple gender-discrimination lawsuit that allegedly started with man’s tax form left on printer gets boost from judge

Apple has suffered a major blow in a massive unequal-pay lawsuit launched against the company after a female employee allegedly found on an office printer a male colleague’s tax form suggesting men at the Cupertino firm were paid more than women for the same jobs. A judge on Friday shot down the iPhone maker’s bid to kill the legal action.

Justina Jong, employed in Apple’s retail and marketing division for more than a decade, had discovered the W-2 form on a printer in 2019 in one of the company’s Sunnyvale offices where she worked, according to her lawsuit filed in June. The document allegedly showed the man receiving almost $10,000 more than Jong, who still works at Apple, for doing the same job.

The purported revelation led to the legal action, which has ballooned, with lawyers for Jong seeking class-action status to bring in more than 12,000 current and former female employees in Apple’s California engineering, marketing, and AppleCare units.

The lawsuit claimed that until late 2017, Apple asked job applicants about their previous pay, leading the company to put women on lower starting salaries than men for the same work. After a California law took effect in 2018 banning employers from asking job applicants about their salary history, Apple pivoted to asking applicants about their salary expectations, the lawsuit said. Research indicates a person’s stated salary expectations are typically only slightly higher than their previous pay, so Apple using such information to set salaries “has had the effect of perpetuating past pay disparities and paying women less than men,” the lawsuit alleged.

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A judge in San Francisco Superior Court last week torpedoed the company’s attempt to prevent the lawsuit from receiving class-action status, and to throw it out.

Apple — worth more than $3 trillion in the stock market and led by CEO Tim Cook, who received $74.6 million in pay last year — did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s order and the claims in the lawsuit.

The company argued in a court filing that the details of each woman’s employment and their managers’ individualized decisions make it impossible for the court to consider their allegations together in a class action. The company has also claimed that Jong and the two other named plaintiffs in the case, Amina Salgado and Zainab Bori, have not identified a company practice that led to unequal pay.

Judge Ethan Schulman in a written order Friday rejected that argument, ruling that evidence must be introduced to determine whether there is a “community of interest” among the thousands of potential class members, or instead that a class action is not possible because of “individual issues.” There is a “reasonable possibility” that the lawsuit’s claims that Apple violated California’s equal-pay law will meet the threshold for class action, Schulman wrote.

Responding to Apple’s claim that lawyers for the plaintiffs failed to identify a company practice causing a gender gap in pay, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ claim that compensation policies are “centrally determined” and are applied the same way to all California employees is sufficient for the gender-gap allegation to go ahead.

The legal action highlights the issue of gender discrimination in Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry. Mountain View digital-advertising giant Google in 2022 agreed to pay $118 million to up to 15,500 women to settle a years-long class-action lawsuit claiming the company, whose most-recent diversity report shows about a third of its workforce are women, of slotting female employees into lower salary levels than men, giving women lower-paying jobs, promoting women more slowly and less frequently, and generally paying female employees less than men for similar work. Bay Area technology giants HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2020 agreed to pay $1.45 million after the U.S. Department of Labor accused them of “systemic pay discrimination” toward female employees.

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Apple’s most-recent diversity report shows, like Google’s, a workforce about one-third female.

Jong’s lawsuit also alleges she was sexually harassed from 2015 to 2022 by a senior member of Apple’s “talent development team,” who allegedly touched her, stared at her and made sexually suggestive comments. Although Jong moved to another department, Apple allegedly pressured her to continue working with the man — not named as a defendant in the lawsuit — moved him into an office next to hers in March 2022, and refused to let her move away.

Apple argued that Jong’s claims arose from a single incident in 2019, so the statute of limitations prohibited her from pursuing them in court. The company also claimed Jong did not allege “severe or pervasive” harassment.

Schulman noted that Jong claimed the harassment continued past that date, so the statute of limitations did not apply. The judge also noted Jong claimed her colleague sexually harassed her “many times,” and she “became aware” that the man “regularly commented on the attractiveness of female employees and often harassed others.” If her allegations are true, Schulman wrote, it could be reasonably concluded that the man’s conduct was “both severe and pervasive.”

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The thousands-strong plaintiff class, if approved by the court, would be open to women in those departments who started working at Apple in the four years before the lawsuit was filed, and those hired before the case concludes.

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