Google rejects US labour department allegations of gender discrimination on pay

Government investigators looking into how Google paid its employees have accused the tech giant of not paying women on par with men doing similar work.

A US Department of Labour official disclosed the agency's allegations during a court hearing on Friday, in San Francisco.

 ''We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,'' Janette Wipper, a Labor Department regional director, testified, according to a report published by The Guardian.

Google said it completely disagreed with the charges, which it had not heard until Wipper's court appearance.

Technology companies had been reviewing their hiring practices that had seen most jobs going to white and Asian men, but their efforts to strike a better balance had not been very successful so far.

For instance, only 19 per cent of Google's technology jobs were held by women, while overall, women comprised nearly one third of Google's 70,000 strong worforce.

The investigation by the labor department comes after a lawsuit filed in January sought to bar Google from doing business with the federal government unless it complied with an audit of its employee-compensation records.

''Every year, we do a comprehensive and robust analysis of pay across genders and we have found no gender pay gap,'' Google said in an emailed statement Sunday. ''Other than making an unfounded statement which we heard for the first time in court, the DoL hasn't provided any data, or shared its methodology.''

The labour department sued Google in January, alleging failure to hand over compensation data and documents as part of a routine compliance evaluation.

According to the labor department Google was required to let the government inspect records for an audit as it was a federal contractor.

Google said it has already turned over 1.8 million data points and spent over $500,000 to comply with the requests, including having its engineers build a new tool to extract information from its databases, according to Lisa Barnett Sween, litigation manager with Jackson Lewis PC in San Francisco, representing Google.